


Sufficiently Advanced Magic

by The_Librarian



Series: The Once and Other [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who - Various Authors
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Arthurian, Gen, Magitech, Mystery, Original Character(s), Post-Serial: s152 Battlefield, can you trust the stories?, companion material, grumpy wizard, sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22999216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Librarian/pseuds/The_Librarian
Summary: Merlin is gone, trapped forever in the Ice Caves. But in a universe where myths are real and magic is part of everyday life, it's hard to believe he's going to stay that way.On a distant world, in the depths of an endless forest, a young girl chases stories of a great magician in the hope that he can save her home from dark powers.(Post-Battlefield, set in Arthur and Morgaine's universe)
Series: The Once and Other [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652878
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	1. The Girl and the Tower

**Author's Note:**

> This has been brewing for a while. And I finally got the first story in the planned trilogy finished just it time to post it after the end of this year's Doctor Who. Nothing in this story relates to current Who, but it might make (slightly) more sense if you are familiar with the 7th Doctor story 'Battlefield'. If you aren't . . . well, good luck!

The minute Gissel laid eyes on the Dark Tower, she almost turned back, and to hell with three days of hard trek through the forest.

When people talked of the house of the great magician, they always used words like dreaded, forbidding, intimidating. She had imagined a wicked titan of a building, lording over the landscape and making all who entered its shadow tremble. She had thought she would feel a bolt of fear run up her spine at the very sight of its terrible spires. She had, at the very least, expected the place to be in decent repair.

Instead, looking up through the trees, she saw a single, twisted stick of a tower that rose from an outcropping with all the foreboding presence of a rain-drenched scarecrow. Perhaps once it might have looked imposing, before subsidence set in and half the roof tiles slid off. Now it seemed more like the ghost of a fortress than the real thing. She had seen more intimidating drainpipes.

Gissel did not, in fact, turn back. For one thing, if she had come all this way for nothing, she was in no hurry to return to the village empty-handed. For another, was it not possible the Tower's appearance was some sort of test? An illusion to dissuade those who were not dedicated enough? That would be in character for a magician – and no one ever finished a quest by giving up at the first hurdle. So giving the crooked ramparts one last hard look, she settled her pack on her shoulders and set off to find the way in.

* * *

There was no actual gate in the gatehouse. It would not have made much difference if there had: half the Tower's outer wall had long since collapsed and what remained looked ready to fall over if someone so much as sneezed in its direction. Gissel hurried through the gaping arches with her breath held, afraid even her footsteps might be enough to bring the whole lot down.

Beyond the lack of gate was a courtyard stuffed with junk, more than she had ever seen in one place before. There were mangles and iron spinning wheels, broken carts and massless carriages, anvils and chains, gutted cabinets, tangled rigging, a lone ornithopter wing – mountains of scrap and rotting wood. Nothing intact. Nothing that looked less than twice as old as Gissel herself. She walked slowly through the midst of it all, ever more doubts fluttering in her stomach.

Had she really come all this way just to find the place where machines went to die?

Her foot knocked against a rusted bucket, setting it clattering against the flagstones. She froze on the spot, heart a-thudding. The ruins around her felt suddenly full of eyes, all turned scornfully upon her. She imagined a hundred things that might come jumping out at her, all of them monstrous and ready to eat intruding travellers.

Nothing happened.

Nothing continued to happen.

The echoes of the bucket's roll passed into history. A single startled crow winged away over the walls. Gissel slowly relaxed. And looked up at the object of her quest.

Close to, the Dark Tower was even more decayed and weathered than it had seemed at a distance. Everything about it was lopsided, sagging, decayed. Climbing plants wove in and out of great cracks in the stonework, making stitches across open wounds. Pillars around the base that must once have stood straight now slouched at drunken angles, mismatched and haphazard. High above, the few windows gaped hollowly, frames distorted, glass a memory. A crown of battlements seemed more like broken teeth after a lost fight. The whole thing was as gnarled and twisted as an ancient tree, pockmarked by the wind and rain of all the centuries it had stood there.

Yet it _was_ still standing and the more Gissel looked at it, the more convinced she became that it was going to _stay_ standing. Somewhere at the edge of her understanding, she knew the Tower would last on and on, long past the death of its walls and the sea of junk, growing more and more worn away by the years without ever actually crumbling. There was . . . something . . . holding it together. Something that stole away the fragility age should have given it. Something that flew in the face of all natural order.

And was that not exactly the kind of power she had come all this way to find?

Taking a deep breath, she fixed her eyes on a doorway nestled among the pillars, half-hidden by shadow and weeds. She marched towards the doors and raised her hand – then hesitated, caught on a barb of indecision. Gingerly, she put out a finger and touched the cracked wood. It was smooth, lacking any of the roughness she expected given how age-bleached it looked.

Should she knock? She should knock. That would be the civil thing to do. The _polite_ thing to do. Trying to barge in would hardly create the right atmosphere in which to ask for help. Yet it was hard to summon up the courage to actually strike the doors. A minute ago that would have been because she was afraid of knocking the tower over. Now . . .

Without thinking she pressed her hand flat to the right-hand door, meaning perhaps to brace herself against it in the hopes that would somehow brace her courage too. The door swung inwards without her needing to apply more than the slightest of pressures.

Gissel stared at the opening in horror. What had she done? What was she supposed to do now? If she just stepped over the threshold uninvited, she would definitely be being impolite. She had already opened the door without knocking. Going inside now would surely make a bad first impression worse.

On the other hand, a second thought murmured, an unlocked door could be taken as an invitation.

And really, she had not come all this way to be turned back by her own doubts. It was true this was the Dark Tower, not the village longhouse but the principle was the same. If someone did not want people to just come in, they would not leave their doors unlocked.

Gissel stepped inside.

* * *

Her eyes took a little while to adjust to the darkness. She had honestly not expected the Dark Tower to be quite so literally gloomy. The name conjured up stories of horrible powers and things beyond the ken of mortals, not an actual lack of light.

There was a line of smooth black flagstones leading in a straight line ahead of her, as unlike anything in the scrap yard outside as new blossom was from old. In the shafts of sinking daylight creeping around her legs, they looked freshly cut and polished. They did not make a floor, she realised, but a long bridge reaching out across an echoing space that, even before she could see it properly, seemed far too big to be contained within the building she had entered. The bridge was maybe a couple of strides across, with an extravagant kind of metal fence serving as a parapet on either side. There was no way forward other than to walk across.

As she took halting steps along the bridge, Gissel saw a light, blue or green, glowing faintly in the distance. At the other end of the bridge, she presumed. Or in the middle. She could not think of anywhere else on a bridge you would put a light, unless you were going to put lamps along its length and there was no sign of that.

The glow got steadily more obvious as she walked. It was wrong to say it got brighter because she was not at all sure it did, just that it became easier to see. Fairly quickly she made out that the light formed a column, reaching up into the darkness As she got closer, she started to understand the scale more clearly. The column must have been a little narrower than her body and it grew from a plinth a little higher than her elbows. This slanted out and down to hip height, then inwards towards the floor. At first sight, it looked round but was actually cut like a jewel. Each face was studded with metal buttons and tiny levers, making her think of the inside of an ornithopter, glimpsed long ago when the old baron and his soldiers came down to make merry at the autumn festival.

Was this some strange kind of altar? That, at least, was something she would have expected to find in the lair of a great magician. Only, if it was an altar, she could not see how it was supposed to be used, unless you were going to worship the column itself. There was no sign of anywhere to put an offering – and so nowhere to make a human sacrifice, which just went to show you could not trust Tom Miller's descriptions of places he had never been.

She made a circle of the plinth and column. They stood on a six-sided platform stuck on its own at the end of the bridge. Around her was yet more darkness and the dizzying feeling of empty space. Luckily, the platform was wide enough that she did not need to worry about falling off and there was another fence around it anyway, so she went back to studying the altar.

The longer she stared at the column, the stranger it seemed. She had assumed it would be like the glass on a lantern, a barrier around some subtle, inner fire. Instead it was solid like a crystal, cut through with veins and flecks. Except those veins were moving, twisting ever so slowly around each other, like . . . jagged wisps of smoke or lightning caught in amber. That was it. There was a sense to it all of something quicker than thought, trapped in a sad, slow dance. Somehow, Gissel knew there should be far more energy within the column, far more life. Seeing it like this – this was not how it was supposed to be . . .

Quite without meaning to, as she leaned in closer for a better look, she rested her hand on the edge of the plinth. To her utter horror, the moment she did, a great ring of lamps flooded light into the room. Whirling around, she got a dizzy look at a vast space, curving walls lined with more books than she could believe existed. There was a black stone floor a house's height below her, a scattering of chairs and tables that looked childishly small and –

“What do you think you're doing?!”

The man appeared right beside her, chalk-white face a picture of pure fury. His long red hair flapped wildly as he turned to follow her startled jump around the altar. Gissel stammered, trying to apologise, voice withering away beneath the man's glower.

“What are you doing in here?” he demanded, advancing on her remorselessly.

“I – I'm – I came to – t-to – t-the baron, he's, he's – please – I came to get help!” She almost shouted it out, convinced he was about to pick her up and throw her over the edge.

“Help?” he repeated in a hiss, “ _Help_? You came _here_ for _help_?”

“W-wh – y-yes!”

“ _Why_?”

She gaped at him, still backing away. “I c-came to find the magician – t-to find Merlin!”

It should have been impossible for the man to look any more furious. He managed it all the same. “There is no Merlin here!” he thundered, voice filling the enormous room.

Gissel felt cold and burning hot at the same time. Desperate, she opened her mouth to plead, to beg, to tell this shouting demon how important it was, how much she needed the magician's help –

“ **GET** **OUT** **!”**

Propelled by the deafening order, almost physically thrown from the building by the enormity of the rage behind it, Gissel turned and fled.


	2. The Knight and the Forest

Gissel was halfway down the hill before her nerves steadied enough that she could actually think about what had just happened. Pressing a hand to a tree trunk, she propped herself up and took several whooping breaths. Her mind wind-milled, fear and shock all muddled up with shame and despair. And anger.

She kicked the tree. Hard. All that effort, all that long journeying, every rule and order she had defied getting there – for nothing! She had made it all the way to the Dark Tower, had stepped over the threshold – only to be thrown straight back out again, chased from the building by – she did not even know who it was who had turned her away. Could that have been . . . ? No, surely not. Magicians were grand men, serene in their wisdom and magics. Not shouty people with untidy hair. He had not even looked very old!

Only . . .

Did the stories about Merlin not say he could change his face as he wished and that he sometimes looked like a child compared to the years he had seen pass? That he defied time as easily as she might step over a stream? So perhaps . . .

Not that it mattered. It was quite clear she had made a wasted journey. And now – now she had to go home. Back to her mother's disapproval and her father's disappointment and all the misery for which she had set out to find the cure. A whole week would be gone and she would have nothing to show for it but aching legs and worn shoes.

She wanted to cry and wanted to scream. She wanted to kick the tree again and keep kicking until it broke in half.

Perhaps she would have too, except for the realisation that the day was dying. However long she had been inside the Tower – and she discovered could not say for sure – it was long enough for evening to have crept up on the forest. The shadows under the trees were deepening quickly and the air was turning cold. Soon it would be nightfall and she would be walking alone, far, far away from any home or hearth.

Looking up the hill, she considered marching back to the Tower and demanding shelter until morning. The image of the shouting man rose like bile and she turned firmly away. No. There would not be any shelter there. She fingered the knife on her belt, the straps of her pack where they crossed her chest. One night. She just needed to pass one night then get to the hunting lodge in which she had slept the day before. She could do that.

The determination did not quite jostle the frustration aside, but it gave her enough of a kick to get started. She could cry later, when she was well away from the bloody Dark Tower.

* * *

The night rushed in far faster than even her most pessimistic expectation. It felt like hours since she had allowed herself one of her carefully saved apples as an evening meal. Hunger gnawed at her stomach and the need for sleep chewed at her eyes. She could barely see a few steps ahead now. Darkness was turning the trees liquid and the footing treacherous. More than once, branches caught her stinging blows across the face. The thought to construct and light a torch came too late to be of use. Cold and loneliness swallowed any sense that she was making progress.

And then she started hearing noises.

Not the usual snuffles and hoots that could be expected to fill a forest at night. Gissel knew the sounds of animals at hunt, of bats and owls and all the other normal, safe things that came out after sundown. This was something else, something padding on the edge of hearing, circling around behind then in front of her. One minute she would be convinced it was the very absence of noise. The next, it would reach her as the quietest scraping sound, as of metal passing very gently across metal.

Very slowly, she pulled out her hunting knife, senses aflame even through woolly tiredness. Her first thought was that it was wolves, only wolves rarely came after people, even those lost in the blackest of nights. They were too wily and cautious. Her second thought was that it might be a bear, but that would surely have been louder, more definite in its movements.

Her third thought was of all the darker things that lived in the forests. There were so many terrors she could imagine stalking her. The spiders of the mind. The iron-clad trolls of the southern sky. The nameless things that you forgot were chasing you. So close to the Dark Tower, it was easy to believe she might meet such creatures. Though, surely being close to the Dark Tower was exactly why that should not have been likely. Had Merlin not cast down all those things in one time or another? They should have cowered in fear of his home.

 _'There is no Merlin here!'_ The man's shout filled her ears anew. If that were true . . .

A branch cracked loud and close, off to her left. She froze. Nothing moved. The forest was, for a few seconds, entirely quiet. Then an owl screeched in the distance.

Gissel started walking again, blood pounding in her ears, hand tight on her knife. The unreal silence continued to circle around her. Then the scraping noise came again, closer yet. She quickened her pace, searching in vain for familiar landmarks. Was she even still on the path? She tried to remember what it had looked like in the daylight and recalled only scattered, disconnected images, each as useless as the next.

There was the scraping again. And again, on the other side. Twice. Two of the things. Her mouth went dry.

She began to run. The things ran after her, no longer absences or gentle movements but loud and definite, crashing through the undergrowth. She stumbled against a knot of tree-roots and was aware for one dizzy instant of something closing fast on her heel, lunging for her ankle. She jerked her leg forward and plunged on, full of the need to _get away_.

The ground tipped sharply downwards and disappeared and she pitched into a mad rolling slide through a nightmare of weeds and saplings. When the landing finally came, it slammed the breath out of her and left every bone jarred, every nerve jangled.

The clearing was a good twenty feet wide. From where Gissel lay on her front, she could see silver moonlight dappling a carpet of tangled undergrowth. Trees loomed all around, silent witness to her tumble. Inky shadows filled the spaces between them like impenetrable walls. She glanced down as she pushed herself on to her knees. In the uneven darkness, her hands looked as black as the soil she could feel beneath them.

To her horror, she discovered that was all she could feel: her knife was gone, flung away in the fall.

The metal scraping sounded once more, louder than ever. Gissel looked up.

It _was_ a wolf, a big, _big_ wolf. It stood just inside the tree line, muzzle gaping, teeth flashing in the moonlight, eyes like two bottomless wells. As it moved, so did the armour that chased across its back and down its legs. The plates shifted almost perfectly with its gait. Where they did not, they brushed against one another with that sibilant rasp. Its claws were curved talons far too long and sharp to belong to any natural creature.

Another armoured wolf followed the first into the clearing. A glittering motion in the corner of Gissel's eye announced a third, even bigger than the first two, stalking around to flank her.

She shook, mesmerised by the sight. Instincts screamed at her to run, to keep grabbing for the lost knife, to grab a branch and _fight_. She could do nothing of the kind, transfixed by the awful knowledge of what had found her out alone in the middle of the night.

The wolves circled her. One of them lunged and snapped and her mind blotted out in fear that she was about to feel its teeth on her throat. But it just went back to pacing with its fellows. She cast about for any possible escape and found none. For all the muscles working the forge had given her, any of the wolves could have pinned her before she got a couple of paces.. Even if she had her knife, what good was it against their armoured hides, their razor claws? She was trapped, as helpless as a mouse. They could kill her any time they wanted.

Except what was coming was far worse than death.

They could have kept her there for hours or a mere handful of minutes, she had no idea which. All she remembered was kneeling still as stone, watching the wolves pace and stare pitilessly back.

When it came, the silver knight ghosted out of the forest as if made of mist. It towered over her, as hugely proportioned as its servants and doubly as lethal. There was no scraping from the plates of its armour, no trace of animal urgency or unrefined humanity. Every motion was precise, every step perfectly placed. When it looked down at Gissel with the same black eyes as the wolves, she saw nothing but emptiness, a soullessness that was going to swallow her whole.

The knight reached out a gauntlet, hand open to seize her. **“You belong to us,”** it said, voice ringing weirdly from within its helm, **“You shall become like us.”**

“Not today, thank you.”

Knight and wolves spun as one. Around their bulk, Gissel saw a new figure stepping into the clearing, swathed in a too-big cloak. It stood defiantly before the knight, absurdly brave.

The silver knight considered for a few heartbeats. The wolves snarled.

“ **You belong to us,”** the knight repeated, exactly as before, **“You shall become like us.”**

“I can't quite see myself filling out the armour.” The figure raised its arms, letting the cloak fall limply about them. “And I hardly think that slip of a girl over there would do much better.”

The wolves stalked forward, tensing to leap. **“Do not resist,”** the knight ordered with no sense of urgency whatsoever, **“You cannot escape.”**

“I bet that's what you say to all the boys,” the figure retorted and the next instant, there was a thin rod in its outstretched hand. “Let me teach you a different tune.”

The clearing filled with a wail that made Gissel's rattle shake in her skull. The wolves howled, dancing about, all trace of hunting attitude vanishing into the need to get away from the noise. As its servants scattered into the forest, the knight took a step towards the person in the cloak, steel fists raised high.

Those fists fell apart. Exquisitely crafted fingers disintegrated into a shower of pinging metal fragments. The knight's whole body shook as the banshee shriek grew ever more persistent. Then greave and pauldron and pauncer, every part of the armour, all of it separated at once. The knight collapsed in a clattering heap, glinting plates falling away from something that twisted like a pile of dry twigs and crumpled to the ground.

Relief and amazement hit Gissel a double blow, making the world swim. A light touch on her arm was all that stopped her following the knight into the undergrowth.

The figure pulled back its hood and shook out a mane of wild hair. “Well now,” said the shouty man, no longer shouting, “It seems I caught up with you just in time.”

* * *

He took Gissel back to the Dark Tower, lighting the way with a fireless storm-lamp. They did not speak to one another as they walked. She stumbled after him, doing her best to keep up in spite of bone-aching exhaustion and the treacherous footing.

A single light shone from the Tower, from one of the high, broken windows. Gissel could see it for a long time before they reached the outer wall, breaking through the trees to guide them in. She wondered dimly about that as she tramped up to the door in the man's footsteps, wondered how such a small beacon could be seen from so far away.

The shock of returning to the room inside the Tower quickly washed away the thought. In the light of the ring of lamps, it seemed even bigger than before. She could see far more of the crystal column, which still glowed faintly with that strange slow dance within. Was it her imagination that the flecks and veins were moving a little quicker now?

She had no time to be sure. The man swept on past the altar and she followed him down steps that spiralled around the pillar on which it stood. That must have been how he had appeared so suddenly before, up from the floor below.

A simple wooden table had been set close to the foot of the stairs, on it a plain wooden bowl full of steaming hot stew, beside it a single chair and another bowl on a wash stand. “Clean you hands,” the man instructed, shrugging off his cloak, “Then eat.”

Not even stopping to take off her pack, Gissel did as she was told. As she scrubbed the dirt from under her nails, she watched the man hanging his cloak on a crown of hooks that sprouted from the top of a pole on the other side of the steps. He really was very much younger than she imagined any magician could be, no more than a handful of winters older than she was. His face, even when not screwed up and shouting, was sour looking with hollows under high cheek bones and a disdainful arch to the eyebrows. His hair was the most vibrant ginger she had ever seen and completely unkempt, all tangled knots and ragged ends.

Catching her looking, he snorted and stalked away, moving stiff and hunched shouldered like a much older man. Gissel hurriedly dropped her gaze and slapped the water from her hands. The stew smelled heavenly and hunger drove her straight to the chair. She picked up the spoon and started shovelling chunks of meat and parsnip into her mouth.

Eating absorbed her attention so much that she was shocked to look up a couple of minutes later and find the man sitting in a deep green armchair only a few feet away. The armchair had not been there before, meaning he must have pushed it over while she was not looking, or just magicked it into place. She was distracted both by that idea and by his clothes, which consisted of a simple grey jerkin over britches of an odd blue/white material she had never seen before. There were a great many strange implements hanging from his belt, all pushed about and glittering in his lap. They must have clattered and clinked as he walked but she could not really remember hearing them do so.

He cleared his throat and looked down his nose at her.

She swallowed. “Thank you. For killing the knight.”

“Hm.” Sniffing, he examined his bony fingers. “It was pointed out to me that throwing a child out into the middle of a wild forest at night was not a very gallant thing to do.”

She thought it was probably polite not to agree too vigorously with that and covered the impulse with another mouthful of stew. Chewing slowly, she looked around for whoever it could have been who had pointed that out to him. There was no sign that anyone else lived there, though given the size of the room, whole families could easily have done so. “I’m not a child,” she told him.

“What are you, barely fourteen?”

“I’m fifteen winters,” she snapped, irritated that he was going to patronise her on top of everything else.

“I’m so sorry,” he told her mockingly, “A whole fifteen winters. And you just thought you’d take a jaunt to the Dark Tower? Haven’t you heard the stories?”

“Of course I have.” Scowling, she thought about every tale she had ever heard about the Dark Tower, all of them mysterious, awful and gruesome. She picked the one least likely to have been overly embellished by the Tom Millers of the world. “It belonged to the King of the Fairies until Merlin won it from him in battle.”

“Really?” Something approaching a smile flitted behind the man’s lips. “The way I heard it, Merlin stole it from the wizards of old. But that’s stories for you. Always changing in the retelling.”

Gissel considered that until she sighted the bottom of the bowl. Gnawing suspicion ate away at the back of her mind. She knew she would have to ask, even though it felt like a very bad idea. There was suddenly a cup of water on the table beside the bowl and, without questioning it, she took a deep drink.

“Are . . . are you Merlin?” she asked before her courage could desert her.

“I told you!” The man's face flashed with the anger, the same fury with which he had thrown her out before. “There’s no Merlin here!” Gissel flinched but the moment passed and he calmed down again. “Don’t you know that Merlin’s dead? He was tricked by a sorcerer far more wily than he, sealed forever in a cave of eternal ice.” There was a ghoulish delight in the way he said it.

“No one believes that.” Because they did not. No one who ever told stories of Merlin ever acted as if that was the end of him. “Everyone knows he'll come back one day.”

“Everyone knows that do they? And they would know this, how, exactly?”

“I don't know,” she admitted, “They just do.”

“And if you're not Merlin,” she added, feeling even more irritated with him, “who are you?”

He let his head loll to one side, as if keeping it up was too much effort. “Well, who are you?”

“I asked first.”

“And this is my home so I win.”

She held his off-centre gaze with determination. His eyes were hard and blue and she knew immediately that he was never going to blink first. But she held out for a full minute, just to make the point.

“Gissel Smith.”

“Named for your parents I suppose.”

“My _mother_. My pa's a tale-teller.”

“Ah ha!” he exclaimed, as if this explained everything. Probably it did.

“So what's _your_ name?” It was obvious that he was not just going to tell her.

He rolled his eyes. “What does it matter? I'm me. What would a name tell you that you haven't already learnt?”

“Who you are,” she told him, perfectly reasonably.

He rolled his eyes again. “I am . . . I'm Foreman. There. That's my name,” he said in a way that made Gissel pretty sure it was not, “Much good may it do you.”

'Foreman' sank back into his chair and glowered sulkily at something only he could see. Gissel sipped at the water left in the cup, which was more than she expected. Surely it could not be filling up again? She remembered where she was and decided yes, it could.

“Why are you here?” he asked abruptly, “Why did you come here? You were trying to tell me when I . . . yes, well.” At least he had the decency to look embarrassed about that. “Something about a baron?”

There was a big part of her that seriously considered throwing the water at him. His manner was clearing the fug of tiredness just as well as the hot food and she was not in the least bit inclined to have a civil conversation with someone who was talking to her like he was. On the other hand, the more sensible angels of her nature pointed out, he was asking about exactly what she had come all this way to ask _him_ about. Or not him, exactly, but the magician who lived in the Dark Tower and that did seem to be him.

“The new baron,” she began slowly, “The one who came after the old baron died two years ago. Ever since he took over, he's been making things miserable for my village. For every village in the Valley. He's raised taxes so high hardly anyone can pay any more.”

“Isn't that what barons are for?”

“He's worse than any baron we've ever heard of. He's always sending his soldiers out collecting and when people don't pay what he says they owe him, he takes them instead. He's locked up dozens of people and they've never been heard of since.”

“And, what? You came looking for some spell that would make him die in his sleep?”

Gissel slammed the cup down on the table, as much to make sure she did not actually throw it at Foreman as to express her anger. “He's making everyone suffer! It's not fair!”

“Then invent anarchy and communism and be done with it!” He flung up his hands. “This is what barons do. All those noble barons and lords and princes and kings – they take from everyone else whenever they like. It's in the job description. Don't come whining to me about fairness if you can't be bothered to organise your society better.”

His callousness took Gissel's breath away. “He's got an army! Soldiers with swords and guns! We can't just stop him taking what he wants! We can't just – 'organise our society better' whenever we want! _We_ don't get a choice! If we try, he'll just send his soldiers in to kill us!”

“Won't that make it a bit hard for him to get his tithes from you? You control the means of production, so he can't do without you.”

Sod the cup, she was going to throw the chair at him. “He controls his _army_! And he's a sorcerer!”

Finally something other than smugness or sullen irritation appeared on Foreman's narrow face. He leaned forward, just a little. “A sorcerer? Really.” His voice was still condescending.

“Yes!” Gissel stood and flung her own hands up, mimicking him. “He's a sorcerer. He's got magic on his side too. The last time he rode out with his men, he killed Farmer Brose because he wouldn't pay the wheat the baron wanted. The baron crushed him down to the size of a walnut, right in front of everyone! He's a monster!”

Foreman jolted upright in his chair, practically quivering. What little colour there was drained out of his cheeks and his eyes bore into her so hard she thought they were going to leave marks. All at once, she wanted to get very far away from this person, whoever he really was.

He relaxed as suddenly as he had tensed and dropped back to rest an elbow on the arm of his chair. He brushed his lips with the edge of his finger. “You've had a long day.” His voice was an echo of itself. “There's a sofa over there, should be comfortable enough. Go and get some sleep.”

Gissel opened her mouth to protest, to demand an explanation.

Foreman spoke over her before she could make more than a couple of stuttering noises. “We can talk again in the morning.”

Driven by the lingering impression of his stare, she did as she was told, her body obeying without really bothering to ask her mind what to do. She went over to the long couch Foreman had pointed out and found it covered in blankets and cushions. It was the most comfortable object she had met in her entire life and she had to clear out some of the cushions before she could actually lie on it without fearing she would suffocate.

When she finally got under the blankets, she was sure the room would be far too bright to sleep but the lights were already dimming. The returning darkness turned her eyes to lead, bringing exhaustion over her in a tide. The very last thing she saw before she fell into a deep, untroubled sleep was Foreman, somehow back up at his altar, fingers flying across the plinth and all those hundreds of buttons.


	3. The Widow and the Experiment

Daybreak came inside the Dark Tower. From where Gissel lay, the great ring of lights seemed like a set of round windows funnelling in pale morning sun, not the lamps she had taken them to be the night before. She squinted up at them, drowsily trying to work out which was the truth. Eventually she decided that in the Dark Tower, it could very well be both and sat up.

There was no sign of Foreman. Other than that the chamber was much as it had been when she fell asleep, saving that someone had put her boots more neatly together at the foot of the 'sofa'.

Her bare feet were soundless on the black stone floor, which was comfortably cool against her skin. She hesitated on tip-toes, wondering what she should do in the absence of the magician. Having very much decided that he was a magician, and a pretty unpleasant one at that, she was not really of a mind to upset him, certainly not if there was a chance he would help them against the baron. Wandering around his home uninvited seemed just the sort of thing that would upset him. On the other hand, he _had_ left her there alone and unguarded, so . . .

Sometime in the night, or perhaps just as she looked the other way, part of the shelves behind her had swung open to reveal a short passageway and three doors. The first two Gissel tried were locked. The third opened into an ornate room that turned out to be a very complicated privy.

When she returned to the main room, there was a fresh bowl of steaming porridge waiting for her. She ate half of it before remembering that terrible things happened to people who took fairy food. After a little thought, she decided that it was already too late and that it would be criminal to leave good food half-eaten.

As she finished the last morsel, licking it carefully from the spoon, a sensation of being watched crept over her. There was no one there when she looked up, which did not worry her as much as perhaps it should. Her eye was drawn up towards the crystal column and it must have been her imagination but for a moment, she had a clear impression that it was smiling at her. She looked away quickly and put the spoon neatly into the bowl. If she had been at home, she would have needed to wash it out along with everyone else's. Here, it seemed all she had to do was turn her back. Both bowl and spoon were gone by the time she collected her boots.

She thought about putting her pack on as well but decided that would make it look too much like she was planning to set straight off for home. If she was going to try convincing Foreman to help, she might as well give the impression she would be going nowhere until he did.

Since the bookcases had closed again, the main doors were the only way out of the room that Gissel could see, so the obvious thing to do was to check to see if Foreman was outside. Halfway up the steps to the altar, it occurred to her that this might give him the chance to sneak around behind her and lock her out of the Tower entirely. After all, if there could be one secret passage behind the books . . .

No, that was silly. He was not just going to just turf her out after saving her life.

Probably.

The doors opened easily, almost swinging into her hands as she pulled their handles. Outside, a fine rain filled the air with the smell of newly wet soil. Junk still cluttered every corner of the courtyard. Gissel was uncertain if it was all the same junk or if it too had changed around when she was not looking. Since one pile of scrap was a muchness with any other, did it matter either way?

She found Foreman by following the banging noises and curses. He was buried in the remains of a vehicle that looked like it had once been something halfway between a cart and a massless carriage. A few flecks of bright yellow paint clung to the rusted frame and to the warped panels stacked in loose heaps on either side. Only two wheels were still attached to their axles, at opposite ends and on opposite sides. The heart of the thing was torn open, wires and tubes spilling out in every direction. Foreman had one of those tangles wrapped around his left hand while he reached his right arm deep into whatever was left of the inner workings. There were smears of grime on his cheek and several pieces of dead wood caught in his hair.

“You're awake then,” he said without looking up.

She told him she was, because if he was going to say daft, obvious things, she was going to respond in kind. “Are you trying to fix that?”

“Trying. Failing. Time puts all things beyond repair eventually.” He grimaced as something shifted in whatever he was fiddling with. “And sometimes you just can't get the parts.”

With a grunt of effort, he pulled a distorted lump of blackened _stuff_ free, held it up to his eye, then threw it carelessly over his shoulder. Swinging around so that he was perched on the side of the carriage, he began twining pairs of wires together at the ends, twisting the tips sharply, two after the other.

“Can you fix it?” she asked, honestly curious.

“I could. Probably. If I really wanted. Mostly I'm doing it so I can think.”

This was a hopeful sign. “Um . . . what are you thinking about?”

“About how I make my home in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere on a world that is mainly undifferentiated forests in the middle of nowhere and people still turn up on my doorstep apparently having not got the hint. Also, that someone surely should have invented a way of repairing inner tubes that is superior to a lump of chewing gum somewhere in the multiverse yet I have never so far encountered it. Thirdly, what we should do about this problematic baron of yours.”

“You're going to help us?” Gissel's heart leapt.

Foreman inhaled in one long sniff. “I'm thinking about it.” All the wires paired up to his satisfaction, he pushed each of the combined tips into one of the small holes in a box by his hip. Once they were all in, he tentatively poked the big switch on the top. Absolutely nothing happened.

With a sigh, he got up and wiped his hands on his britches. “All right, let's go.”

Gissel blinked. “Right now?”

“You come stomping up here, demanding I go slay your evil landlord and now you're getting tetchy that I'm willing to set out to do so right away? Kindly make up your mind.”

This was not in any way an accurate description of what Gissel had done but any chance to point this out was lost as Foreman pushed past her and walked back to the Tower.

Considering whether it might not be too late to find some more amenable means of freeing the Valley – a dread wyrm, for example – Gissel followed him.

* * *

Foreman was already at his altar when she reached the chamber, staring intently at one of the faces of the plinth. As soon as she was inside, his hand darted out and stabbed a button on the next face around. The door slammed behind Gissel, hard enough to make her jump.

“What are you doing?” She spun one way to confirm that the doors were very definitely shut then back the other to glare at Foreman. “I thought you said you were going to come and help.”

He returned her glare effortlessly. “I did not say that though that was certainly the implication I intended to convey. Yes, I'm going to come and – well, at least take a look. But I've no interest whatsoever in traipsing through mile after mile of unkempt woodland, dodging whatever monstrosities have washed up along the way. We're taking a short-cut. I suggest you hold on to something.”

All at once he was a blur of motion, springing around the plinth, jabbing buttons and throwing switches. A deep booming sound echoed up from under the floor, shaking the bridge and making Gissel grab for the closest fence rail. The sound rose in pitch, shifting, changing, becoming more penetrating. In the crystal column, the veins and flecks began to glow more vividly, the blues and greens growing richer and brighter. They started to twist faster, the jagged dance speeding up to match the magician's manic movements. Lightning flashed from the top of the column to the bottom, then from bottom to top, again and again. The veins spun into new patterns. The flecks became stars then suns, blazing and dancing. The whole chamber shook, groaned, resounded to the booming from below.

There was a noise like the world was splitting in two.

Then silence.

The eldritch fires in the column died away slowly. Foreman's mad dashing eased to a walking pace and he calmly returned the levers to their original positions. With one last pulse, the glow from the crystal softened and dimmed.

Gissel's hands hurt from how hard she had gripped the rail for support. She gaped at the red lines across her palms. She gaped too at Foreman, who rolled his eyes again and charged to the doors. He flung one of them open – outwards instead of in – and made an expression that clearly meant he was waiting for her to go first, and that by hesitating for even a fraction of an instant, she was causing an unacceptable delay.

Dumbly, still stunned from whatever had just happened, Gissel went outside.

She was standing at the top of a hill. In a meadow. A meadow she recognised immediately as one belonging to Farmer Brose – to his widow now, she supposed. The sun was shining. On the horizon, where the forest rose into the mountains in rocky fits and starts, a bank of dull grey cloud was squatting over the place where the Dark Tower was supposed to stand.

The Valley. She was back in the Valley, back where she had started from, looking towards the end of her journey, where she had been standing not five minutes past.

Foreman came up beside her, looking intolerably satisfied with himself. Gissel slowly looked over her shoulder, expecting to have to cope with the vision of the Dark Tower sticking out of Farmer Brose's best hay.

What she saw instead was a tree. A great solid oak tree, towering up in a tangle of ancient branches. Part of its trunk hung open, just like a door. Gissel could see the room inside the Dark Tower quite clearly through the opening, the vast chamber contained within a space no wider than she was tall.

“That is very clever,” she said, because it really was.

Foreman's eyebrows rose. “It is, isn't it?”

“We're really home – back near my home? Just . . . just like that?”

“I could have got you back the same day you left,” he told her airily, “but why should I make your life easy? Which way is your village?”

She pointed to the smoke rising from behind the next hill over. Foreman immediately set off towards it and just as immediately changed his mind. “Where can I find the remains of the late and presumably lamented Farmer Brose?”

“Um . . . I . . . I don't know.” Gissel scratched the back of her neck. “I don't know what they did with him . . . I suppose Madam Brose must have –”

“And where does she live? No, no, never mind – just take me there. Chop, chop,” he added when she hesitated for more than a heartbeat.

“Shouldn't you lock the door to your . . . tree?”

Waving one hand in irritable dismissal, he snapped the fingers on the other. The door in question closed with a bang. “There. Satisfied?”

Now the door was shut, the oak tree looked perfectly normal and as if it had been rooted in that spot for centuries. It was hard to see how he was going to get it open again. Perhaps he could do that with a snap of his fingers too.

She nodded, because what else was there to do? “It's this way.”

As they walked downhill, Gissel thought about the village and about her parents. One of those wavering lines of smoke would be from the forge, where her mother would even now be beating red-orange metal on the anvil or smelting foul-smelling mixes into workable iron. Her father's stories said that the worlds had been created in the fires of a celestial forge, beaten with the hammer of the gods on the anvil of time. Gissel's mother was god of her own little world and knew it. There was not a blacksmith for miles who could match her for skill and fine work and as much as other smiths would tout their greater strength or endurance, Gissel was sure her mother could have out-done them all in a straight contest.

This was an impression born of fifteen winters being told to respect the profession from which she took her name, in the certain understanding that she herself had two left thumbs and the kind of eye for detail that put bent nails halfway through the wrong side of a horseshoe.

Gissel was not looking forward to the confrontation that was undoubtedly in store for her when she finally got home. Magician or not, she would doubtless be accused of slacking as usual, never mind the three days in the wild forest. Her father would not be any better. He never could stand to see his wife upset and would have been worrying himself stupid over Gissel's absence. She could hear it all now . . .

“The wind will change and you’ll get stuck with that expression,” Foreman muttered as they came in sight of the Brose farmhouse. She ignored him.

The Brose house was one of the biggest in the village, since their farm was the biggest and so they could afford to barter for the services of all the best stone masons. Madam Brose would have settled for nothing less. Her high ideas, as Gissel's father called them, extended to a floral garden beside a most elaborate herb patch and her very own servant to keep the house for her. It was Matilda who answered Foreman's imperious knock, blinking out from the threshold with watery eyes.

To Gissel's, shock the magician broke into a charming smile.

“Compliments of the day to you, my good lady. May I inquire as to whether your mistress is receiving visitors?”

Matilda stammered that Madam Brose was in mourning and that she was not at all sure – at which point the lady of the house herself called impatiently from behind her, demanding to know who it was. Foreman took full advantage of the distraction to sweep straight past the half-turned housekeeper and on into the main room. Gissel nipped in after him to make sure she did not miss the show.

Madam Brose was seated in a high-backed chair before the fireplace, resplendent in widow's weeds, complete with a veil that she had temporarily removed in order to take a mug of ale. Her eyes came out on stalks at the sight of the wild-haired young man, even further when he swept her the kind of bow you would give a baroness or even a queen. “Madam Brose, it is with deepest condolences that I intrude upon you at this saddest of times,” Foreman effused, every word ringing with sincerity, “I am most apologetic that I have disturbed you and pray that you will find it in your heart to forgive this impertinence.”

“Oh. Well. My word. Well yes. Of course.” Madam Brose clearly did not know where to look, much less where to put her ale.

Foreman beamed. “Your graciousness is humbling, my dear lady.”

Pink blotches appeared on Madam Brose's quivering cheeks. Gissel supposed this was her blushing but could honestly say she had never seen it happen before. “Not a lady, sir, not a lady really.” She settled for holding the mug low in her lap, where the puffy cuffs of her black dress could hide it. “What, ah, what is it I can do for you, master . . . ah . . . ?”

“I am but a lowly doctor of physik,” Foreman told her, giving another, slightly less elaborate bow, “One who by chance and happen-stance heard about your most dreadful misfortune. Words cannot express the regret I felt to know that such a pillar of the local community had been so cruelly taken from us.”

Quite forgotten by her mistress, Matilda made a strangled noise then quietly shut the door. She frowned at Gissel, who gave the sweetest smile she could manage. Matilda humfed.

“Well I will not of course say a word against the baron,” Madam Brose was saying, “I bow to his justice as do we all.” There was, to give her due credit, a catch in her voice as she spoke. It was clearly an effort to avoid outright calling him the monster he was. “And if it is his will to dispose of his subjects in such a manner, I must abide by that.” That she watched her words like that made Gissel's stomach turn.

“Quite so, quite so,” Foreman agreed sorrowfully, “Your dignity is a model for us all. If you will permit me, however, I would offer my services and make some small effort to ease your pain. This dear child here was kind enough to show me the way to your house and give me some of the details.” He encompassed Gissel in one graceful gesture and Gissel considered braining him with one of Madam Brose's best plates. “I make no exaggerated claims as to my skill yet if I may broach such a delicate matter, I would wish to do what I am able to restore your husband to, ah . . . his proper proportions, that he might be allowed at least that dignity in death. I know it is poor comfort at such a time yet I simply cannot bear the thought of standing by when I might be able to alleviate a fraction of your suffering.”

He did not pause for breath once while he rattled through this florid statement and directed Madam Brose's beady gaze with more sweeping hand motions. When he finally stopped, her stare flicked back to Gissel for a couple of moments then her face crumpled. “Oh good master doctor. Your beneficence fills me with gratitude. Your offer is a most kind one and were it in your power to grant, I would have been most blessed to have you somehow return my husband's mortal shell to 'is proper size. But I fear this child has not the knowing of the whole sad tale. You see,” and here she gave the most almighty sob, “when we came to move poor, poor Mister Brose's body, such as it was, I had not got it more than a half-step into the house when it quite crumbled away in my hands. My very hands, master doctor! That poor shrivelled thing . . . it went to dust and . . . blew away!” Overcome with emotion, Madam Brose sobbed again and took a deep draft of her ale. “Oh do forgive me sir!”

“Nothing to forgive, dear lady.” Foreman lowered to one knee so that he could look into the woman's face without making her crane her neck. He spoke very softly and very kindly. “It was a most cruel fate and one that should not have been visited upon either your good husband or upon your good self. I hope that in time you will be able to savour again the memories you shared together and look back not with pain but with honest sadness. I will not take any more of your time.” He sprang up and bowed yet again. “My thanks again for your kind forbearance.”

The still-disgruntled Matilda was forced to open the door at a rush to forestall Foreman's apparent intention of hurling himself bodily into it. Gissel hesitated just long enough for Madam Brose to give an impressively loud sniff and then say, quite lucidly, “Gissel Smith! Do you have any idea how worried your parents have been? Just where exactly have you been hiding yourself?”

She bolted after Foreman.

* * *

“Why didn't you tell me he'd crumbled to dust?” the magician shouted as Gissel caught up with him. He was striding away along the northern road, covering the ground at an impressive pace and in a mood as foul as his act before the farmer's widow had been genial.

“I didn't know!” she shouted back, indignant.

“In a village this size? What are your gossips _doing_ with their time?”

“You wanted to look at his body.”

“Of course I wanted to look at his body!”

“Why?”

He pushed both hands into his hair. “Because I needed to know I was right about what I thought it was!”

“You only got interested when I told you about what the baron did to Farmer Brose,” Gissel accused, “And then I think you made me go to sleep,” she added, having been suspicious about that all morning.

He waved the idea aside. “You were exhausted, you needed to rest.”

“Why was it so important what happened to Farmer Brose?”

“It doesn't matter! I was obviously wrong about what I thought your baron had done so I'm probably wrong about him.”

“He's not my baron!”

Foreman stopped. Gissel just missed tripping over him. “Describe exactly what happened to the farmer,” he ordered.

“The baron had a stone round his neck. He lifted it up and threw a lightning bolt at Farmer Brose, who screamed and went all shrivelled like a rotten plum and got crushed down to this.” She demonstrated the approximate size with thumb and forefinger.

“And you couldn't have given me this much fuller and more useful description last night?!”

“I was really tired! You just said that!”

“Yes. Well,” he huffed and set off again at the same over the top turn of speed.

Gissel carried on following him. She told herself she was doing it to make sure he actually did help and not at all because it would put off going back to the village properly. This did not ring true even in the privacy of her own head. Still, after putting the effort into getting him to coming to the Valley, she did feel responsible for ensuring that the magician did what he was supposed to do and defeated the evil sorcerer.

“What does it mean?”

“Hn?” She had sped up enough to come alongside Foreman and he glared sideways at her. “What does what mean?”

“What happened to Farmer Brose. Shrinking, turning to ash. What does that mean? And what did you think it meant before?”

“It means a man is dead and not through any of the normal methods your kind has for killing one another. It means that someone was able to destroy him so utterly as to reduce his body to a walnut of ash. It means that your baron has access to one of the thirty-seven technologies or magics that I know are capable of producing that kind of effect. It means that he _doesn't_ have access to the particular technology that I first thought he might.”

“And that's good, yes?”

“Are you defining ‘good’ as him being unable to kill people in one particularly nasty way but still being able to kill them in another particularly nasty and slightly more messy way? Because if so yes, absolutely, it's fantastic.”

“I just meant . . . you seemed . . .” She did not finish the observation mainly because Foreman started staring fixedly ahead with an expression that suggested he was considering shrinking her too.

“What could have done that? How did the baron do it?” she asked instead.

“He's a sorcerer. You're the one who said that!”

“No! I mean – you said you knew thirty seven ways to do it. So which do you think he used?”

“How should I know? _I_ didn't see him do it and my only witness to the act has strenuously failed to provide a rigorous enough analysis to allow me to draw a firmer conclusion!” He grumbled and flapped away at her as if she were a gadfly. “It sounds like all the binding energy in his body was simultaneously extracted and funnelled through a compression field. Probably into that stone your baron was wearing. How big was that anyway? What did it look like?”

“Like a stone,” Gissel muttered and heaved a sigh. “It was big and white and it was on a chain round his neck. That big I think.” She measured it in the air between them. “I couldn't see it very well.”

“Has anybody ever told you that you would make an utterly terrible forensic scientist?”

“No,” she told him with absolute accuracy.

They strode on in a mutual bad mood for a little while, the track winding through rolling meadows and tumble-down ruins that gradually faded back into woodland the further north they went from the village. It was as they rounded the sharp bend by Tallow's Rock that Gissel recognised the path they were on. “Where are we going?” she blurted out as apprehension came galloping into her head.

“To your baron's castle,” Foreman said as if it had been obvious all along, which in fairness it would have been had she given it a moment's thought, “I looked up his address while you were snoring away last night. Quite the natural vantage point he's got up there, though of course there's nothing really natural about this so called 'Valley' of yours, is there? Ridiculous misnomer anyway, 'vale' would be more accurate, 'impact site for an out-of-control generation ship' even more so –”

“We're just going to walk up and knock on the castle _gates_?” The idea made Gissel feel a little sick.

“Always go to the source. It saves a lot of running around and getting arrested, which when you get to my age is something you find increasingly tedious. And what do you mean we? In fact,” he added with another sideways glare, “what exactly are you still doing here? This is an exceptionally dangerous and foolhardy thing to do, of the kind that should be kept out of reach of small children. Go back to your village immediately.”

“But you've needed me to tell you about everything!” she protested hotly.

“Exactly. 'Needed'. Past participial. Thank you very much and good –”

Without warning, he ducked down behind the wall they were passing. “What –?” Gissel began, only for Foreman to stretch up a hand to her shoulder and firmly push her down beside him. He put a finger to his lips, then slowly lifted himself so that his eyes were just above the top of the wall. She did the same and followed his gaze.

A big square tent stood at the bottom of a long slope. It had the baron's coat of arms painted on the sides and was being guarded by a couple of knights in full armour, their guns held across their chests. The tent flaps were hanging closed, giving no clue as to what lurked inside. A massless carriage sat idling a couple of yards away, the driver huddled in his saddle. Behind him, another knight stood watch over five war horses as they grazed placidly. Not a great deal seemed to be happening.

Gissel knelt next to Foreman for at least three minutes, watching as nothing continued to happen unless you counted bored-looking people in armour scratching their noses and horses ambling about being generally horsey. The only interesting thing was how thoroughly miserable the carriage driver looked. He kept glancing across at the tent from under his floppy hat and then quickly looking away again, almost curling in on himself. Whatever was going on inside, this was not a man who was comfortable with it.

Elbowing Foreman in the ribs, Gissel started to ask how long they were going to keep crouching there. Inevitably, as soon as she got the first word out, something happened.

It was hard to say what because it happened entirely inside the tent. The edges of a tremendous flash of light sneaked out from every gap and seam, accompanied by a terrific rending noise that reminded Gissel just a little of the sounds the Dark Tower had made when it was in motion. This was followed by an almighty bang and rolling blue-black smoke that set the guards coughing violently. If not for that, they might have been better placed to react to what happened next.

Several people started shouting at once, then a shape bust through the tent flaps, barrelling past the guards before they could stop it. The person – it was surely a person – staggered a few feet forward before stumbling. As they fought to stay upright, the smoke cleared enough for Gissel to get a proper look at them.

Bile rose in her throat. It was a man. She _thought_ it was a man, tall and broad. His clothes were smouldering rags and his hair was almost entirely scorched away. The skin she could see was blackened and – _melted_. His eyes stared from under a brow sagging like wet clay. His ragged attempts at screaming came through lips that barely existed any more.

Gissel was halfway to her feet before she properly realised that she was trying to rush to the man's aid. Foreman was already over the wall and running. The guards at the tent levelled their guns and fired – not at them, though Gissel's heart thumped so hard she was sure she had been shot, but at the ground in from of the burnt man, stopping him going any further. He fell to his knees, his whole body convulsing in pain.

Another figure came out of the tent, unhurt and striding confidently. The sun glimmered off his curling golden hair and the velvet sheen of his red tunic. Gissel's stomach churned that little bit more as he cupped a gloved hand around the white stone hanging on a gold chain around his neck.

“STOP!” Foreman thundered, loud enough to jolt the knights and get them to point their guns at him instead, “Drop the trionic lattice and step away from the victim of your mad scheme!”

The baron did not so much as bat an eyelid. There was a crack of lightning and the poor, agonised man was crushed a nutshell of ash that burst the moment it hit the ground.

“Mad scheme?” the baron inquired, voice ringing clear and cool, “Not at all! And since you seem to have some idea what this is, you should come and take a closer look.” He waved imperiously towards his knights. “I really must insist.”


	4. The Prisoner and the Wand

The knights scooped them up on their horses to carry them to the castle. Gissel's captor kept a gauntlet on her shoulder all the way there, as if that was necessary to stop a single blacksmith's daughter escaping the top of a speeding charger. The quick snatches of Foreman she could see by twisting her head made her think he was not nearly as uncomfortable as she was. He mainly looked bored.

The baron rode ahead, a proud figure resplendent in his red velvet, leading the way as befitted his rank. The massless carriage followed a ways behind them all, the tent and whatever had been inside safely stowed aboard. Gissel still did not know _what_ that was. She had not gotten any chance to see it before the guards swept down on her and Foreman.

Soon the baron's castle loomed at the end of the road, a towering cliff of grey stone. If she had never seen the Dark Tower, Gissel would have been very impressed. But next to that, the castle looked soulless. It was just a building with none of the timelessness or immovability of the Tower. She could well imagine flung boulders smashing it to pieces and fervently hoped for such a thing as she was carried through the gatehouse, passing under the shadow of the portcullis and the gun emplacements covering the approach.

* * *

To Gissel's utter surprise they were taken not to a dungeon but to a reception room hung with faded tapestries. She sneezed at the smell of dust. Foreman immediately crossed to the narrow window and stared out at the bailey.

“What would you expect a noble baron to do with his tithes?” he asked with a quiet frown.

“Put them in his storehouses to feed his soldiers and his friends.”

“Which makes it a little peculiar that he's got so many sacks and barrels stacked up on hover-trucks out there. Besides,” he went on, shoving his hands into the pockets sown into his britches, “what soldiers? Did you see any more than those three knights? Any men-at-arms or guards?”

Gissel had to shake her head. As far as she could tell, the castle had been deserted when they arrived.

“This place should be teaming with flunkies. Yet it doesn't look like it's had a good clean in weeks, let alone housed a baron's court.” Drawing one finger along the top of a delicately carved chair, he examined the dirt that came away on the tip. “Curious. And you tell me the baron's locked up dozens of people . . .”

“Does it matter?” Gissel hissed the question. “You're in his castle, you've seen his magic – you can defeat him now, can't you?”

Foreman sighed heavily. His face suddenly seemed more deeply aged than anyone she had ever met. “Oh, Gissel Smith. I'm really not who you think I am.” For once his voice was almost kind, free of any sarcasm or irritation. He came over to her and gently took her hand. “This land of barons and lords and peasants you were born into – I can't just magic it all away. I'm sorry.” Quite suddenly, he pulled her into a tight embrace. “If you want to change your world,” he whispered, “you're going to have to do it yourself.”

The door creaked open and Foreman released her. Gissel clutched at the wall for support, completely baffled by what had just happened, and got a handful of fabric for her trouble.

“Young lady, take your fingers off that tapestry,” the baron said coolly from the doorway, “It is worth considerably more than your life.”

“Then I suggest you start improving the morale of your cleaning staff,” Foreman remarked as Gissel hurriedly let go, “They've clearly given up on maintaining this room in the circumstances to which it is accustomed.”

The baron smiled. He was rather handsome in a well-fed sort of way but it was hard to forget that barely an hour before he had killed a defenceless man without so much as blinking. “A minor sacrifice for the sake of progress, I fear. I am Baron Magnus, lord and protector of this land. Might I know who it is I have brought into my home?”

“You can call me Foreman. This is Gissel. Smith on her mother's side.”

Magnus prowled into the room, radiating confidence and control. Gissel shrank back, wishing fervently that Foreman had not told the baron her name. The only comfort was that she seemed to be beneath his notice, for he only spared her the briefest of glances before turning his full attention on the magician. “You intrigue me, Master Foreman. You truly intrigue me. I would regard you as a peasant if I met you on the road, fit only for the company of wretches, which you obviously favour in any case. Yet you understand this, do you not?” He lovingly brushed the cursed stone that still adorned his chest.

“Oh I understand it all right. Your trionic lattice. It's a terribly crude method of transferring energy you know. You'd be safer trying to catch lightning in a bucket while wearing plate armour.”

“It has served me without fault.”

“As evidenced by you not being a steaming pile of ashes on the floor.” Foreman's voice went icy. “Unlike your victims.”

Pacing up and down the room once, The baron actually chortled. “My victims. Yes . . . you must think me incredibly wasteful, seeing it from the outside. Unless you already divine my true purpose?”

“Oh good, you've got a true purpose. I'm _sure_ it will be worth however many lives you've extinguished to make that rock glow a little more warmly.”

“It is, I assure you. You know what this is – do you also know what it can be used for?”

Foreman sneered at him. “Returning to the state of this room, might I suggest powering a vacuum cleaner?”

“Your flippancy masks understanding, I think. But perhaps it would be better to show you so that you cannot weasel around the reality of what I have achieved.” The baron clapped his hands, bringing one of his knights clattering through the door. “Take the brat to the cages with the others.” He smiled at Foreman. “She can stay there to ensure good behaviour on the part of our new friend here.”

The look Foreman gave him should have reduced him to a smear on the floor. Gissel was extremely disappointed that it did not. The knight clamped a hand to her shoulder and yanked her off to one side as the baron put a companionable arm around the magician and guided him out of the room.

She twisted to look up at the knight's face, mostly hidden under his helmet. She did not imagine she would ever be able to manage a glare as murderous as Foreman's but gave it her best try. The knight's lip curled and his fingers dug hard into her flesh. He did not need to say anything to give her the firm impression that he would snap her in two at the first sign of disobedience.

Gissel went with him quietly.

* * *

After living under the threat of the Baron's dungeons all her life, she found the reality a little bit underwhelming. True, the air smelt sour and it was exactly as dingy as she always imagined but it did not seem to be especially damp and it was not even very cold. So that was an upside. As she was shoved into a long, narrow cage and the gate was locked behind her, Gissel was pretty sure it was the only one.

There were people in the cages on either side of her, huddled up in rags and tatters. She caught them looking warily at her as the knight's lantern passed by. No one spoke though. From the small sounds after the dungeon door slammed, shuffling and quiet sobs, she guessed there were a lot more people penned up in the dark.

The contents of her own personal cell consisted of a short wooden bench nailed to the floor, some straw and a bucket. It was not even a very big bucket. Nothing remotely helpful if she wanted to get out, which was not really a surprise. There would not be much point in a dungeon from which it was easy to escape. Gissel paced from one end to the other, looking for loose flagstones and finding none. She tried the gate just in case the guard had forgotten to lock it. He had not.

She tugged at the bars experimentally, hoping that they might by some miracle come loose.

“It's no good. You won't get out.”

The person in the next cell pressed themselves right up against the side of their cage to look at her. It was hard to make out the details in the gloom but from the lack of a beard, Gissel thought the other prisoner was probably a woman.

She was right, too. The bars were roughly made but they were solid and Gissel doubted she had either the strength or the tools to pry them apart. Frustrated, she gave up and sat down on the bench. “Has anyone? Got out, I mean?”

A thin laugh made its way past the woman's cracked lips. “Not in any way you want to think about.”

Icicles formed in Gissel’s stomach. “How . . . how many has he killed?”

“Tried not to count but I don’t think there are any of the old baron’s men left.”

Back to memories of that autumn festival, all those men laughing and drinking, their colourful tabards flashing in the sun. “They’re all . . . all of them?”

“Yes. Fed them into his machines, one by one. Watchmen, stable-hands, cooks, servants. Thunderbolted anyone who tried to stop him. Then he started bringing people in from outside when he ran out of people he didn’t need here.”

Gissel squeezed her eyes tight shut, gut churning. Of course she had known the baron was a monster. That he was taking people away and – but she had never imagined –

“Who . . . who are you then? Are you from one of the villages or . . . ?”

“I'm Jesser. I worked in the stables. Until the baron decided he didn't need that any more. That the knights could muck out their own horses. Said it would be more efficient.”

That seemed mad, with knights supposed to be all big and grand and above the little things that kept life going round. But Gissel was too horrified to worry about mad things now. “How long have you been . . . ?”

“I lost track. A couple of the others reckon it's been a month, maybe a bit more. He takes us out from time to time. The ones he doesn’t just kill. When he needs us.”

“For . . . what? If he doesn’t . . . why’s he keeping some of you alive?”

Jesser did not answer right away. She took her face away from the bars and looked aside for a moment or two. “He's got this . . . thing. All pipes and jars. Says it's to take our 'life force'. To 'distil' it. Every few days he'll drag someone out and put them through it. The strongest, he says. The ones who’ll survive. Which sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t.”

“Why –”

“I don't know. I don't know, child. Maybe it's best not to know.”

Gissel closed her mouth and nodded again. “I'm Gissel Smith. From the village.”

“I'm happy to meet you,” Jesser said, summoning a weak smile, “I'm sorry it had to be here.”

Wrapping her arms around herself, Gissel stared miserably into the darkness beyond the cage. A sense of utter failure seeped into her very bones, treacle black and as crushing as an avalanche. Foreman was off gods-knew-where with the baron and who knew if his magic was really a match for this diabolical man who had killed more people than she had ever imagined. Foreman certainly didn’t seem to think it would be. And his despair doubled hers up a thousand-fold.

She had wanted so badly to save everyone. To get help for them when it seemed they were never going to help themselves. To reach into legends and stories and bring back some great and powerful champion who would make everything better. Now here she was: trapped in the dark with no way out and no one coming to save her, with people in danger right next to her and no way to protect them. She rocked back and forth, still hugging herself, quite unable to think of anything else to do.

Something stabbed into her leg.

The discomfort came through dimly at first, just something else to make her feel awful. But its very existence was enough to drag her attention to it. After all, there was nothing there that could be causing it. Her knife was gone, lost in the woods around the Dark Tower. So what . . . ?

Her questing fingers found the sheath, still hanging from her belt. Found the object that was _in_ the sheath.

She pulled it out. A long, knobbly metal rod, tapered at one end, rounded at the other and heavier than its size suggested. There was buttons and twists all along its length. And –

It was Foreman's wand. His magic wand, the one he had used to destroy the silver knight. He – he must have slipped it in when –

When he had hugged her. He had given it to her when he hugged her. Why in the name of all that was holy had he done _that_? A fresh bolt of horror hit her. He was facing the baron without even this to help him! The very thing that produced his magic and he had given it to Gissel –

Had he gone completely mad _–_ ?

“ _If you want to change your world, you're going to have to do it yourself.”_

Gissel shot to her feet, confusion turned to anger turned to – was it hope? It was certainly determination. Foreman had given him his wand; he must have expected her to use it. If not, why drop such an unsubtle hint? So she would use it and –

She did not have the first idea how the wand worked. Not a clue. Was she supposed to press the buttons? Which ones? What would happen if she got it wrong?

“What've you got there?” Jesser asked, though Gissel barely heard her. Think it through. She had to think it through. Would Foreman just have blindly given her the wand? No, that did not make sense. He was rude, condescending and bad-tempered but she did not think that he was daft. Whatever his flaws, he would not have given her the wand if he did not expect her to use it. So he must have expected her to be able to use it. And that meant . . .

Gissel spun and pressed up against the bars of Jesser's cage. “If I got the doors unlocked, is there a way out of the castle?”

“What are you – what are you talking about? How could you –”

“Is there a way out?!”

Jesser stared at her, eyes wide. “There . . . there're passages that can get us to the gatehouse. But – the knights –”

“How many are there? I only saw three.”

“I think . . . I don't think there can be many more than that. Maybe four or five? The others . . .”

“Fed to the baron's machines? All right. That's good.”

“But we can't fight them! Some of the people in here – they're too weak. We've tried to share our food but – and they won't be able to run. And – the baron kept setting things into all the walls around the castle. Mechanical things for watching movement. More efficient than guards.”

That was a big problem. But if the wand could take care of a silver knight, Gissel was sure it could take care of whatever mechanical magics the baron was using to replace the people he was killing. In fact . . . that actually gave her an idea.

“I think I've got a plan,” she told Jesser.

“You _think_ you've got a plan?”

“I'm working on it. Give me a minute. But if I can get these cages open, will you try to get everyone out?”

“Look, I don't know what you think –”

“Will you _try_?”

Jesser stared at her again. Then she nodded, very slowly. “I would try. Any chance to get out. I will try.”

“Good. Thank you.”

For a minute, Gissel paced up and down, turning her idea over in her head until it looked a little bit like a plan. If you squinted and did not make it support too much weight. She hefted the wand in her hand and held it out like Foreman had done. She moved it about in her hand until it felt comfortable. Foreman's fingers were much longer than hers but she thought that even with that, the most natural thing to do would be to press the button that ended up under her thumb.

The wand emitted a soft warble and she quickly released the button. A rush of movement off to the side told her that she really had Jesser’s attention now. Good.

If the baron had things for watching people, it would be daft not to put some in the dungeon. So, thinking very hard about that, Gissel raised the wand and pressed the button again. This time she held it on and the warble kept going. She turned in a circle, sweeping the wand up and down as if it were a hose and she were spraying water. Once, twice, three times the sounds it made changed, becoming sharper. And as they did so, she got a flash of shapes across her vision, like the blotches you saw after looking at the sun that fraction of a second too long. Only these did not fade but sort of lodged there in her mind, hovering over parts of the dungeon wall whenever she looked at them.

Aiming at the first, she thought about that machine breaking, then quickly changed her mind and thought instead about it showing that all was well and no one was escaping. The wand chirped and whined, its song getting harsher. The after-image changed colour.

Taking that as a good sign, she moved on to the next, then the third, repeating the process. With that done, she turned her attention to the cage locks.

Doubt and second thoughts crowded in on her. She was not a hero from one of her father's stories, graced by destiny and sure of fate. She was just herself. Gissel Smith. A poor apprentice to her mother and the last person anyone would rely on in a crisis. She didn’t know what she was doing! How could she even be sure the wand was working for her? She was no magician – she was just guessing and maybe seeing things because of how much she wanted to be right. Now she was going to take other peoples’ lives in her hands and trust to her guesses to get them out alive? What was she _thinking_?

That if these people stayed here, the baron was going to kill them. That if she stayed here, the baron would probably kill her too.

It was not exactly steely resolve, but it felt like the next best thing. Gissel pointed the wand at the lock, thought very hard about turning keys and pressed the button again. There was a soft warble, a metallic click and at her touch, the cage door swung wide open.

“It worked,” she breathed. Which probably – hopefully – meant that the seeing devices really were out of action. Tentatively, heart in her mouth, she took a step outside the cage. Then another. Nothing happened. No alarms, no guards, no thunderbolts.

“How did you do that?” Jesser demanded.

“Like this,” Gissel said and pointed the wand at Jesser's cage. A second later, the older woman was stumbling out, disbelief plastered across her face.

The wand made quick work of the remaining locks. There were half a dozen prisoners in all, dressed in rags, shaky and weak. One man could not even stand and had to be hauled out by two others. They gathered in the middle of the dungeon, looking expectantly at Gissel.

“What now?” a man with a grey beard whispered. Everyone seemed to understand the need to keep quiet, which was a relief.

“I'll go first and turn off the seeing machines,” Gissel hissed, “Which way do I need to go?”

“Up and then left,” Jesser said, wringing her hands, “But if you're seen –”

“I won't be.” It was surprisingly easy to sound confident. If there was one thing Gissel was good at, it was sneaking around where she wasn't supposed to be.

The dungeon door yielded as easily to the wand's magic as the cages. The steps back up into the castle were steep and spiralling. She took them one at a time, listening intently. There was nothing but silence from above and when she finally poked her head into the passageway at the top, she found it completely deserted. Hardly daring to believe her luck would hold, she found and tricked the next lot of mechanical eyes then crept back and beckoned the prisoners to follow her.

They made their way through the castle like that – Gissel following Jesser’s directions to clear the path forward, the others following along when it was safe. The passages were eerily quiet. She expected to have to dodge at least one or two patrolling knights but they never came. All the way to the gatehouse it was just seeing devices and cold stone, the only noises coming from a bunch of people trying very hard not to make any. This was good, obviously. But unsettling.

Gissel fooled the last eye and turned to Jesser. “Is that door . . . ?”

“The way out? Yes. It opens just inside the gates.” She was breathing hard and had almost doubled over, hands braced against her thighs, as if she’d been sprinting all the way, not tiptoeing. “Sealed from outside but it can be opened from here.”

And easily too. Gissel had to scramble to stop it swinging wide. Once she had it under control, she eased the door open a crack. Just as Jesser had said, there was the inside of the gateway. It was hard to see much but if she angled herself just right –

The edge of one of the castle’s great doors was visible against the far wall, solid black iron around toughened wood. The gates were open and from the way the light fell on the floor, the portcullis was not down. Meaning the way out was clear. Unless those gun emplacements had mechanical eyes too. Twisting awkwardly, she aimed the wand and tried the trick to find things she could not see. No after-images showed up. Perhaps the baron had only put them inside –

“Uh . . .so,” Jesser hissed in Gissel’s ear, “How are you going to get rid of the guards?”

“Guards?” Gissel started to say, only to mentally kick herself instead. She was focussing on machines when of course the gatehouse would be the one place in the castle that was sure to be manned. She looked at the haggard faces of the prisoners. Just trying to make a run for it was out of the question. If anyone noticed what was happening, it would all be over. Perhaps the wand could do something against gunfire . . . no, she would not risk that if she could avoid it.

“Is there something I could do that would draw them away? Something that would mean they’d need to drop everything and deal with it? Like . . . setting something on fire, or . . . ?”

“I don’t . . . a fire wouldn’t need . . . oh.” Jesser licked her lips. “The horses. I mean . . . I’m here and there’s no one else left so if you . . . well –”

“Tell me how to get to the stables.”

* * *

Gissel was not really a horse person. She was not afraid of them, not exactly, but she had never been particularly good with them. Perhaps because they were never very good with her. Which was fair, given her attempts to shoe them. Most of the time she got along with the ones in the village by a common agreement to stay as far away from one another as possible. So going near a stable by choice was something of a new experience.

Starting a stampede would be even more so.

The knights’ horses were kept in a long wooden shed built close to the inner wall. By flattening herself against the side and sliding along until she was nearly at the end, she got herself a good view of both the gatehouse and the keep. The gates were open, just as she’d thought, and there was one guard keeping watch from the battlements. He kept walking over to look down into the bailey. Gissel suspected he was bored and that what was going on inside the castle was more interesting than what wasn’t outside.

In this case, that mainly consisted of three more knights and the carriage driver loading barrels on to – what had Foreman called them? Hover trucks? They just looked like more massless carriages to Gissel, albeit bigger and heavier than the ones draymen in the valley used. None of the people loading them looked happy to be doing so. The knights were stripped down to their shirts, their amour piled up nearby. They kept casting nervous glances towards the keep, perhaps afraid the baron would decide they weren’t working fast enough. The driver just seemed miserable and barely looked at the others. No one was paying the slightest bit of attention to the stables.

Perfect.

Very slowly, Gissel raised the wand and thought about all the bolts on the stable pens sliding quietly back. She put the word ‘quietly’ at the very front of her mind. The wand rewarded her with the faintest of burbles and the distant rasp of metal on metal. She let out the breath she had not registered holding.

The knights and the driver did not appear to have noticed anything. The guard on the gatehouse had wandered away to the other side of the battlements.

Gissel looked down at the wand. Some of the stories she knew said that magic came in many flavours and kinds. That some of those kinds were poisonous. She had not thought much about those tales when she was simply fooling machines and unlocking doors. But the next step of her plan, using Foreman’s magic against living creatures . . .

Quite apart from wondering whether it would work, she could not help but wonder what it would mean if it did.

There was no time to waste though. The longer she waited, the greater the chances that things would all go wrong. Taking a firmer grip, she raised the wand and pointed it through the wooden wall to where she assumed the horses would be waiting. She could smell them, that peculiarly thick scent that went with them everywhere. She focused on that and thought about every bolting horse she had ever seen, every mare and stallion that had ever shied away at her touch. She imagined that, repeated over and over, fear and rage becoming something unstoppable.

The sound the wand made went through her head like a drill. The reaction from inside the stables was instant. Whinnying cries and pounding hooves joined in with the shriek as it grew louder and louder. Gissel tried wrapping her free arm around her ears but that did nothing to block the terrible noise.

The horses burst from their stalls, stamping and bucking and screaming. Some of them rocketed through the open gates at a flat-out charge, barrelling blindly towards the waiting carriages. Others wheeled around and back again, as if trying to throw the sound off like an unwanted rider. The driver went flying as the carriage he was standing on flipped over. Crates and sacks tumbled in all directions, splitting on the flag stones or colliding with more cargo and setting off fresh landslides. The knights shouted and scrambled to get out of the way. On the gatehouse, the guard was leaning over the battlements, staring at what was happening.

Below him, Gissel saw the door behind the gates ease open and Jesser peer out. This was the chance, while everyone’s attention was on the horses. Go on, Gissel yelled silently, go now.

One of the knights hurtled through the air, a bay charger launching him across the courtyard. Another was bellowing for help, demanding that everyone get out there _right now_. The gatehouse guard hesitated then dropped out of view. Jesser flung the door wide and the prisoners hurried out as best they could, vanishing one by one through the still-open gates.

The knight who was shouting dived out of the way as a burly chestnut tried to stamp on his head. The guard ran out of an archway at the base of the gatehouse, skidding to a halt as he took in the scene at ground-level and tried to work out how to help without getting his bones broken. Behind him, unseen, Jesser hesitated and Gissel cursed her for wasting time, for risking discovery. Then, to her relief, the woman ran through the gates as well.

Gissel kept the wand sounding for a while longer, just to be sure. The horses went wilder, their mouths frothing, their screams drawing a couple more knights outdoors. It was horrible to watch. A horrible thing to have caused. But as long as it kept everyone busy for just a few moments longer –

The wand stopped. She looked at it, stupefied. Her finger was still on the button but the noise was deafeningly absent. Releasing the control and pressing it again did nothing. Had it taken offence at her actions?

Hopefully that would not matter too much now. Even with the noise gone, the horses were still making matchwood out of the remaining cargo and the knights were no closer to getting them back under control. They would not be heading after Jesser and the rest any time soon.

For a moment, Gissel considered making a run for the gates herself. Surely she could get through the passages before things were back under control? Of course, if she did not and was seen and caught, the knights would discover the escape, undoing all her work . . .

She looked the other way, towards the keep. The baron and Foreman would be in there. Along with who knew what horrors. She weighed the wand in her hand. It had stopped working for her but Foreman was its true master. If she could get it to him, then maybe –

Her legs were moving before the decision could finish forming in her mind.


	5. The Baron and the Cabinet

The inside of the keep was lit with torches, burning away in sconces on the walls. With all the mechanical eyes, Gissel would have expected the baron to use flameless lights. A more mundane means of illumination was almost disappointing.

That was when she realised that she had made a colossal mistake.

There was a seeing device on the ceiling above her. She looked up at her distorted reflection in the smooth black bubble and wondered how she could have been so stupid. Of _course_ there was one in here. Even if the wand still worked, she doubted she could fool it in time. It had seen her the moment she came through the doors. Now all she could do was stand there, waiting for –

What?

Nothing was happening. There were no gunshots or thunderbolts, not even an alarm. The only things she could hear were the ongoing shouts from outside and, ahead, beyond the huge doors that must lead into the great hall, the sound of voices speaking quite calmly.

Was the eye broken? Or . . . had whoever was meant to be watching through it been drawn away to deal with the horses . . . ?

Gissel looked for a way out of the entrance chamber that would not immediately hand her into the baron’s clutches. There were doorways leading deeper into the keep – and a staircase, heading up. A half-remembered idea of how castles were built sent her that way at a run. She slowed down almost at once, not wanting to give herself away if the miracle was true and she really had entered unseen.

She climbed cautiously, gripping the wand all the way. Even if its magic had deserted her, she might be able to use it to stab any waiting guard and get away. The stairs ended at the start of a gallery that seemed to ran the length of the keep. If she crouched, she could hide behind the banister and see through the gaps in it down into great hall itself.

There were no feasting tables or golden thrones. Where such things should have been stood a wild collection of devices, all metal and glass and coiling pipes. These made a rough circle around a tall black that had been placed in the middle of the room. Its surfaces were covered in golden runes but, other than that, it looked fairly unremarkable and Gissel could not see why it should be the focus of everything. Then she remembered the tent in the field and the load on the massless carriage that had come back to the castle with them. The box would be about the right size for that – and that meant it had something do with the melting man.

Suddenly, it looked a lot more sinister than a fancy wardrobe had the right to.

The baron stood beside the box with a smug grin on his lips, watching Foreman pace about among the machines. There no sign of them having begun a magic duel yet. Gissel was not sure whether to be relieved by that or not.

“Well that certainly explains your little export drive,” Foreman was saying, “How much duotronic quartz do you get for your sack of wheat these days?”

The baron chuckled, as if this was a great joke. “This ‘valley of plenty’ is fine for the bare necessities of life but it is hardly rich in technological resources. Fortunately there are those in other kingdoms who are happy to exchange equipment for the guarantee of a comfortable winter.”

“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that the people in _this_ kingdom might find their winter far less comfortable with you spending all their stockpiles? I mean.” Foreman gestured towards the hall doors, which were just out of sight of Gissel’s vantage point. “These strapping lads aren’t going to be much use to you if they waste away, are they?”

So there were knights in here too. That put paid to any idea of outnumbering the baron.

“Of course I have kept enough back to feed my own men. I’m not a fool. It’s no great difficulty now that I have streamlined things here. My ocular net does the work of fifty guardsmen.” Magnus waved a hand past the box at an arrangement of window panes set up in the corner of the room. Each one reflected a different scene, a different part of the castle. So that was how you saw through the mechanical eyes. Gissel squinted, trying to make out what was being shown. At least the baron did not seem to be paying any attention to it at the moment.

Foreman bent down to examine a set of lenses. “So that’s your grand plan, is it? Impossible taxation to buy yourself spare parts for that?” Without looking, he extended one long finger to jab at the black box.

The baron’s smile widened, as if the scorn in the magician’s voice was a great joke. “It has worked pretty well so far. You witnessed the precision jump earlier. A directed translocation from this room to a point of my choosing. I’d say the repairs are coming along quite nicely.”

“Tell that to your test pilot.”

“Hmm. That has been a problem. Some . . . leakage I have yet to correct.”

“How many?”

“Excuse me?”

Foreman straightened, his back to the baron. “How many people have you condemned to death to test your repairs?”

“Oh, a few. The cabinet requires an operator to function. No remote control, I’m afraid. Fortunately no expertise are required so the attrition rate isn’t a huge concern. It _would_ be rather inconvenient to have to train someone up every time, don’t you think?”

“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”

“If you are so concerned with the wastage, shall we stop dancing around and get to the point of this conversation?”

From where she was, Gissel could see Foreman’s expression and it sent chills through her. If she thought he looked angry when they first met . . .

But when he turned away from her and addressed the baron, he sounded almost cheerful. “You want my help fixing up your little travel cabinet because even with all the materials you’ve scrounged together, it’s taken you two years to restore basic functions. Who knows how long it’ll take you got make it properly flight-worthy.”

“Exactly! I want to be gone from this primitive place, to somewhere I can actually rebuild what was taken from me. I do not imagine you would be sad to see me go, so our interests should align nicely.”

“Hah.” The noise Foreman made was not even close to a laugh. “Perhaps. While you remain here, you will no doubt continue making life miserable and short for everyone. Helping you leave might be considered a public service. How does it feel, by the way?”

The baron’s eyebrow rose. “Feel?”

“To die by degrees. I’ve only ever done it all at once, so I’m curious what it’s like. Unpleasant, I hope.”

Baron Magnus stopped smiling. Gissel tensed, lifted the wand, ready to throw, to shout a warning.

**STAY.**

The word echoed in her head. But it was not –

“You are more perceptive than I gave you credit for,” the baron told Foreman.

“You meanwhile are wearing your capsule’s power source around your neck. That would be a pretty stupid thing to do unless you needed it to stabilise your molecular structure. And the pile of organic distillation equipment over there tells me you’ve been trying to feed it a more refined diet. It’s not hard to work out what that ‘leakage’ did to you on the way here. Less spectacular than melting on the spot but still.”

“It’s nothing. A mere inconvenience. I just need to keep the lattice’s ambient output boosted until I finish the repairs.”

“By murdering innocent people.”

“Some of them survive! If they’re strong!” The baron’s self assurance seemed to be deserting him. There was a new desperation in his eyes as he strode towards Foreman. “If you help me, then I can get somewhere with the technology to reverse what happened and no more of your precious _innocents_ need be harmed! If that’s really what you care about.”

Foreman did not move. Did not react to the closed distance between them. His voice was soft as he asked, “You think I don’t care about them?”

“I’ve read what passes for history in this benighted place. I’ve heard the stories of the Dark Tower and the sorcerer in the forest. If you are he, then you have stood idle through much suffering on the part of those who live here. All those petty tyrants, the droughts, the plagues. Where were you through all that, master magician? Why are you here now? Not on behalf of these _peasants_. No . . . you want this, don’t you?” The baron fingered the stone then waved to his black box. “You want that!” he spat, “Admit it! The power and brilliance of science this world has never dreamed of! Mastery of time and space! You came here to steal it from me! Didn’t you?!”

Gissel tensed again. Not that she had really untensed in the first place. But she definitely needed to throw the wand down to Foreman now. The baron looked ready to blast him on the spot –

**WAIT.**

That was definitely not a normal thought. It filled her mind like a bell being rung right next to her ear, deafening her intentions. Was it – was it _Foreman’s_ voice?

He was speaking again, down below, still quiet and calm in the face of the baron’s sudden ranting. “Why would I want to steal from you? Your ‘mastery’ has trapped you here and left you coming apart at the seams. I don’t need that kind of science. It’s a dead-end.”

“I crossed worlds –!”

“Oh please. Catapulting yourself across history isn’t clever. Any teenager with a chemistry set can do that.”

“Then why _are_ you here?”

Foreman turned away and fiddled with another of the devices, rubbing one of the spikes coming out of the top. Gissel could not see his expression. “I suppose you’re right, in a way. I haven’t so much as helped an old lady across the road in years. Which . . . I could say that I wasn’t myself. That I was recovering from war on a scale you can’t even begin to imagine. That there are some things people need to sort out on their own. And all that would be true. Not necessarily right, but true.” He tapped the device’s glass front. “The thing is, that logic is easy to cling to when you’re on your own, safely isolated from anything that might change your mind. It’s a lot harder to keep up when the world comes knocking on your door.”

Letting out a long, resigned sigh, he tugged his collar straight, smoothed down the front and sides of his tunic and faced the baron once more. “I’m here because someone asked for my help getting rid of you. Now I’ve met you, I’m happy to oblige. You’re like most everything else that comes crashing out of the sky on this lost little world: a monster washed up by the tide, thinking you can cheat your rightful fate. If I were someone different, I might feel sorry for you. Escaping the revolution only to find yourself dying anyway. But you don’t deserve pity. And I’ve none to show you.”

“Fine words,” Magnus snarled, “but they mean nothing. You have two choices. Help me. Or die. Will you do the sensible thing, magician? Or will you be more fuel for the lattice?”

Foreman shook his head. “I will not help you. Even if I wanted to, that machine would dissipate you the moment you tried to use it. I’d be happy to arrange that, of course, only I’m fairly certain it would set your pet rock off like a bomb and irradiate the entire valley.”

“Well, if that’s true, you will not be around to see it.” Pulling the scraps of his composure back together, the baron gripped the stone – the lattice or whatever it was – and slowly raised it as far as the chain would allow. “Thank you for the conversation. It has been most animating. Goodbye.”

Things happened far too quickly for Gissel to react. As the last syllable left the baron’s mouth, Foreman’s arm shot out, something glinting between his fingers. There was a brilliant flash, the lightning from the stone painting jagged lines on the back of Gissel’s eyes. But it did not strike Foreman. Instead, whatever he was holding sent it bounding away, straight up into the roof. With a dull boom, one of the beams turned to ash and a rain of dust fell right on top of the baron. While he was busy covering his eyes and coughing, Foreman dived for the device with all the spikes.

“Shoot him!” the baron shouted, drawing a clatter of men in armour and the whine of guns powering up.

Foreman’s hands blurred across the device. He ducked beneath sizzling shots and slammed his hand against the glass.

Gissel’s vision was still cut through with after-images from the lightning but she would have sworn that the air above the spikes pulsed and rippled like water after a fallen stone. Then everything around Foreman went flying away, hurled aside by some unseen force. The baron, the machines, all of it. Even the knights, or so Gissel assumed from the cries and the clanging thumps.

Only Foreman, the device with the spikes and the black box were left standing. “You can throw it now,” he said, looked up at the gallery.

Gissel rose cautiously. “How did you do that?”

“Misaligned gravity lathes have a tendency to produce shock waves. Or did you mean this?” He opened his hand. A shiny black disc nestled in his palm, trailing the chain by which it had been attached to his belt. “Karnian obsidian. Good for deflecting misfortune. Now if you don’t mind . . . ?”

She threw the wand.“You were in my head.”

He caught it deftly. “You were going to get yourself killed. I thought it was obvious I wanted you as far away from here as possible, not racing back into danger.”

“I got the other prisoners out.”

“I guessed. Luckily Magnus was too busy telling me his life story to notice the interference on the monitors.” He frowned at the wand and tried a few of the buttons. “Ah.”

“It’s stopped working.”

“Clearly. Should have given it more time to recharge after last night. Never mind. I was planning on doing this bit hands-free anyw –”

“Look out!”

If Gissel had been a second slower with her shout, the lighting bolt would have hit Foreman squarely in the jaw. Instead, it singed the tips of his hair as he dropped and rolled behind the gravity lathe. Gissel followed his example, dropping flat just in time. A second bolt blew a chunk out of the wall behind her.

The baron stalked back into view, clothes covered in dust, face covered in pure hatred. The stone flashed and lightning bit into the lathe, cracking the glass and sending up fountains of sparks. “Interfering maggot! I’m going to kill you! Then I’m going to kill your little pet!”

Gissel yelped as another blast hit the gallery rail.

“I really don’t think you will,” Foreman shouted, flattening his back against the lathe, which shuddered under the baron’s onslaught.

“Oh? You expect me to show mercy? _Pity_? You fool!”

“That’s not what I meant. Hey, Gissel Smith! Want to know something interesting about trionic lattices?”

Clearly, he had gone mad in the face of imminent death.

“What?!” she yelled, not daring to take her arms from over her head.

“That lighting?” This time, a whole chunk of the lathe exploded and a gout of fire sprouted from the hole. “That’s meant to destabilise the atomic structure of a target so the absorption field can capture the released energy.” The baron moved around, trying to shoot past the lathe. But Foreman simply scuttled around as well, keeping the meagre barrier between them. “But it has to be very specifically calibrated. You don’t just atomise something as complicated as a human being by getting lucky. Try firing at something else and it’s not going to create the same effect. You see why that’s a problem, yes?”

The baron screamed in frustration, unleashing lighting bolt after lightning bolt. Foreman’s shield buckled and shuddered, moments from destruction.

“No!” Gissel shouted, not sure if she was answering Foreman or just yelling at the universe in vain.

“Well,” the magician called back, loud but unhurried, “the destabilising pulse uses up a lot of energy. So if you don’t make up the difference right away – and if you’ve got the lattice performing some kind of long-term background function at the same time –”

The lightning stopped. Gissel blinked rapidly, trying to clear her eyes again. It looked like the baron was just . . . standing there. His face had gone very red and his eyes were starting to bulge, as if he was choking on a fish bone. The stone thumped against his chest, dropped from trembling hands. He swayed, reaching to his throat, to the side of his head.

Foreman stood up. He pushed his hands into his pockets and approached the baron at an unhurried stroll. Magnus made a wet, burbling noise and coughed up a thin trail of blood.

For the second time in as many minutes, Gissel got to her feet as well. “Is he . . . ?”

“Complete molecular collapse. It’s not going to be pleasant.”

“What you said . . . the stone was keeping him alive?”

“It was slowing down his death. This would have happened eventually, no matter what he did.”

“Help . . . me . . .” the baron croaked. His legs buckled and he fell to his knees.

“I can’t. You tried too hard to kill us. Interrupted your life support. Even if I re-engaged the lattice, it wouldn’t save you now.”

His whole body shook. The skin on his face started to sag, rivulets of it running like wax off a candle. He clawed at his chest, at his arms, at thin air. His fingers flopped uselessly, drooping from the bones. “No!” he rasped, “I will . . . not . . . die like . . . this! I . . . am . . . Magnus . . . greeeeaaaaaaakkk – !”

The baron’s voice dissolved, followed closely by the rest of him. Foreman was right: it wasn’t pleasant.

The magician caught the baron’s stone before it could hit the floor. He held it up to the light and tutted.

“Is that . . . it?” Gissel asked, rubbing a bruise on her elbow.

“The arch villain melting into a puddle not good enough for you?”

“I just meant – it’s over?”

“Not quite. You’d better get down here. I’ll need your help with the next bit.”

* * *

In the time it took her to run down the stairs and push through the doors to the great hall, Foreman had opened up the baron’s black cabinet and was rummaging around inside, muttering to himself. The two knights lay by the doorway, groaning inside their armour. Gissel snatched up their guns as she went by. She could not figure out how to take their swords at the same time but hopefully holding the one would make them think twice about using the other. She hurried over to Foreman, stepping carefully around the baron’s clothes and the . . stuff soaking into them.

“I thought you said using this would make the stone explode and . . . radiate the Valley.”

Foreman ripped something from the cabinet’s innards and tossed it over his shoulder. “That was if the lattice was expected to power this thing at the same time it was pumping out a stabilisation field to keep the baron intact. It’d have gone up like a firecracker.”

“But . . . didn’t he . . . make the box move already? He said he did and . . . we saw it, didn’t we?”

“Think of it like the lightning. Once in a while, to punish a pesky farmer, didn’t cause any problems. Trying to act the storm and fury, that was a different matter. Same idea with this. Sort of. A brief charge for a test flight wouldn’t do any harm but trying to get all the way off world _and_ keep the pilot from going to pieces? All sorts of nasty feedback loops and exponential curves. At least by attacking us, he drained energy from the lattice without sending it anywhere in particular. That kind of recklessness while it was plugged into a circuit – you’d be lucky if you just levelled the castle.”

“All . . . right. I think I understand.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s all going to be spectacularly irrelevant in a few minutes.”

“Because you’re taking it all apart?”

“Because I’m going to send this contraption a millisecond into its own past and wipe it out of existence. Which is going to make quite a satisfying bang but with luck won’t do harm to anything outside of this room. Well. Outside of this building.”

“Oh. Good.” The thought of wiping away the baron’s foul magics at once was a very pleasing one. “What do you need me to do?”

“Hold these. Don’t let the tips touch.”

He handed her the ends of two lengths of wire, swapping them for the guns she was carrying, which he promptly dropped on the floor. Gissel peered past him into the cabinet. The golden runes continued inside, making ever more complex patterns. A single seat stood in front of instruments that reminded her of the altar in the Dark Tower. There was a space there that looked just the right shape for the baron’s stone.

“He said it needed someone inside.”

“Hm?” Foreman was rummaging about under the seat, pulling out knobbly crystals and putting them back in a different order.

“The baron. That’s why he put people inside it, to make it work.”

“Oh that. Strictly speaking all it needs is human material and someone to press a big red button. Those wires will take care of the second and as for the first . . .”

Finishing with the crystals, he darted off to the edge of the room and picked up a pair of pliers that had been knocked to the ground in all the commotion. With these in hand, he approached the baron’s remains. “There should be enough left to trick it into thinking there’s an operator aboard.” Using the pliers, he gingerly picked up the sopping tunic and carried it over to the cabinet’s seat. After a moment’s consideration, he added one of Magnus’ boots. “That should do it.” He stayed where he was, looking into the cabinet.

“Is something wrong?” Gissel asked, really hoping the answer would be no.

“Probably not. Some of the parts though . . . they’re familiar. Not just is the general sense. Salvaged maybe?”

“Will that stop you . . . crashing it into itself?”

“No.” Foreman squared his shoulders. “No, that’ll all work fine. Let’s see.” Dropping the pliers beside the guns, he produced the baron’s stone and dropped it into the slot on the instrument panel. Immediately, everything lit up and the stone glowed bright white. Then it began to pulse, faster than a heartbeat, and the cabinet started to make a noise like a trapped wasp. Foreman quickly closed the doors, cutting out the light but not the sound. “We should get back.”

Gissel obeyed as fast as she could, retreating as far as the wires would let her. She did not resist as Foreman snatched them from her.

He licked his lips, then started counting under his breath. The whine from the cabinet grew louder and more insistent. Just as it was starting to get painful, he touched the wires together. There was a flurry of blue sparks and the noise changed, deepening, reverberating through the floor. The cabinet trembled. “And now we should run,” said Foreman.

But he stopped just before the doorway and started to haul one of the knights to his feet. “You help the other one.”

Gissel shot him a look. He glared back. She rolled her eyes and grabbed hold of an armoured arm.

The guard was heavy and did not appear remotely interested in helping himself out of the room. After a couple of tries, she managed to lever enough of him up that she could drag him along, cursing his idle hide all the way. Foreman tore the other knight’s helmet off, spread his hand over the man’s scalp then, absurdly, tweaked his ear. The man’s eyes snapped open.

“What the –”

“Short version: your master’s dead and this room is about to explode. Don’t be in it when it does.”

Clutching his forehead, the knight took one look at the humming, rattling cabinet and bolted through the door.

“Smart fellow,” Foreman commented, taking Gissel’s knight’s other arm to help haul him the rest of the way.

Outside the keep, the courtyard seemed to be back under control. Three of the knights were persuading the horses back into the stalls, or had been until one of their own came hurtling past looking terrified. Seeing Foreman and Gissel coming out behind him, two of the others stepped away from the up-turned trucks and drew their swords.

Foreman sighed and released his grip on the injured man, making Gissel lurch off-balance. The magician raised his hands. “Before we waste time with all the usual tedious recriminations, let me put this in small words you might easily grasp. In about twenty seconds, everything inside that building is going to cease to exist. I think I’ve calculated the blast radius carefully enough that it won’t do much more damage than that, but I would strongly advise that you all back up a bit anyway.”

The knights exchanged glances. They did not put their swords away.

Gissel was just trying to work out the best direction to make a break for it when a clap of thunder made her jump out of her skin. Several loose stones tumbled off the top of the keep, landing far too close for comfort. Smoke billowed through the doors, bringing with it the cabinet’s hum.

The knights scattered. The carriage driver, who had been valiantly trying to lever one of the trucks right-side up, took one look at what was going on and dived behind the courtyard well. Foreman grabbed his side of the guard and dragged both him and Gissel across the courtyard. She did not see how they could make it to the gate in – what was it now, ten seconds? Apparently neither did Foreman because he steered them towards the trucks instead. He dropped the guard behind the nearest massless carriage, pushed Gissel down next to him and then threw himself over both of them.

There was a heart-stopping pause in which all Gissel could hear was the noise the cabinet was making.

And then –

She could not think of the words to describe it. It was like the Dark Tower when it moved, only ten times as wild. She felt a massive rush of hot air wash over them, pressing her into the ground, pressing Foreman’s bony frame down on top of her. That seemed to go on and on for an age and when it stopped, her ears filled with a roar of falling masonry. She flinched, expecting them all to be buried or crushed –

Only that did not happen. The roar subsided. The air stilled. There was quiet. The weight lifted from her back.

She pushed herself up, grabbing ahold of the carriage for support. Foreman stood a few paces away, arms folded. He had a very satisfied look on his face. Gissel stepped out to join him. All that was left of the keep was a pile of misshapen blocks, piled meaninglessly on top of each other. It looked like it had fallen in on itself, each wall collapsing inwards at once. Everything inside must have been completely crushed.

“Oh,” she managed to say.

“Told you it wouldn’t do any damage to the rest of the castle.”

“You said you thought it wouldn’t.”

“And I was right. All those stolen crops should be safe. We can return them to the people of the Valley”.

“Err . . .” Gissel glanced at the results of the earlier stampede.

“I trust this is a satisfactory outcome? This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

She considered for a second. “I didn’t expect you to demolish the castle.”

“I thought we’d established that I only took out that bit.”

“And you didn’t . . . I thought you’d challenge him to a magician’s duel and . . . you know.”

“What, outwit him with a lot of shape-changing and whiz-bang flashing lights?”

“Well . . . that’s how it goes in stories.”

“This is sounding suspiciously like criticism.”

“No. No . . . this is fine. Thank you.”

“Hm.”

A groan came from behind the trucks. Groggily, the knight they had rescued emerged into the open. His helmet had come off at some point to reveal him as a young man with a wide nose and even wider eyes. He stared at the keep, mouth working through soundless questions.

“Oh dear,” Foreman murmured, “I suppose we should let him know he’s out of a job.”


	6. The Magician and the Tree

No one stopped them leaving the castle. The knights who had not already run away showed no loyalty to the baron and no interest in avenging his death. Most of them took horses and rode after their less courageous fellows. A couple chose to stay and help with redistributing the castle stores. The young knight – who called himself Wulelf – explained that while most of the guards had no interesting in facing the villagers without the baron’s magic, he and his friend had nowhere else to go. So perhaps if they helped out, it might go some way to making amends . . . ?

Foreman pinned Wulelf with a scowl and made several veiled threats about what would happen if the stores were not redistributed correctly. Wulelf nodded so much Gissel was worried his head was going to fall off. Foreman said the carriage driver was in charge.

The carriage driver, who had only just come out from behind the well, looked like all his New Years had come at once. Gissel and Foreman left him ordering the knights to finish getting the trucks flipped over and be quick about it.

“Who was he?” Gissel asked as they headed for the path back to the village, “The baron, I mean. You said he told you his life story.”

“Oh, just a fairly typical example of the rich and aristocratic. Naturally assuming he was a genius while other people did all the hard work.”

“And he was from another world?”

“Another place, another time. Far in your past. Though you're in his future.”

“If I ask you what that means, are you going to start insulting me again?”

“Given how much of the past your people have forgotten, I'm not sure you'd have the frame of reference for the answer.”

“So you are.”

“I – fine. Your ancestors left your original world long before he was born. But the revolution that kicked him out happened long before you were.”

“See, I can understand that. So he went into his future – my now – to get here. Why did he do that?”

Foreman sighed. “You're asking a lot of questions.”

“I want to know a lot of things.”

“Hm. I doubt he understood enough about how the cabinet worked to have much of a choice in where he ended up. This world has a . . . it draws things to it. People, ships, time machines . . .”

“Magicians?”

He snorted. But he did not disagree.

They fell into silence for a while, which gave Gissel time to think that she should be feeling happy, ecstatic that everyone in the Valley was free. Somehow, in spite of seeing it happen first-hand, it did not seem real yet. Perhaps it would later, when she could walk around the village and see people looking happier, not always glancing over their shoulders in fear of the baron coming to take yet more.

Perhaps she just needed a head less crowded with questions.

“Did . . . did you mean it? About coming to help just because I asked?”

“I am quite literally only here because you asked for help.” Foreman tilted his head back, studied the sky. “That’s not the bit you want to know if I meant.”

She supposed it was not. “You could have helped us sooner. With a lot of things. You didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Did anyone come asking you for help before me?”

“A few. Never for anything so dramatic.”

“You helped them?”

“Sometimes.”

“The baron asked you for help.”

“Demanded it, in fact.”

“You didn’t help him.”

“No.”

“So it’s not just because I asked,” she concluded, “You _decided_ to help me. Why?”

“Does there need to be a reason?”

“Is there one?”

“Why do you care? You got what you wanted.”

“But I don’t know why.”

Nor did she know why she was pressing him. There was a fairly big part of her that was still afraid of him, of his power to put words in her head and travel leagues in an instant. And yet – she found she was _not_ afraid of this conversation. Most people who scared her, she would never have dreamed of talking to, let alone half-arguing with. But with Foreman, it was different. Perhaps because he really _had_ just saved them all – and spared the baron’s guards into the bargain. Perhaps simply because he just annoyed her so much. Either way, she just had the feeling that she could press him, on some things at least.

She was not planning on mentioning Merlin again any time soon.

“Why you help is important,” Foreman said at last, addressing the middle distance, “But who you help is always _more_ important. We are defined by who we stand with, whose agenda we further. I could have helped the baron. Perhaps even rid you of him by doing so. But then I would have chosen to help a mass murderer. Not the ‘peasant’ who might have been his next victim.”

“That’s just saying you helped me because it was the right thing to do.”

“Isn’t that reason enough?”

“That’s the third question _you’ve_ asked _me_. I think you’re trying to be clever to get out of answering.”

He managed something like a smile, though it quickly faded away. "Then let me ask you another one: why did you come to my tower? What made you decide that the solution to your baron problem was the old wizard in the forest?”

Gissel shrugged. “Fight a sorcerer with a sorcerer.” That was not what he wanted to hear though, was it? “I . . . no one was doing anything. No one wanted to stand up and fight. They were all too afraid. I was so angry about what was happening. You said barons always make people miserable. Maybe that’s true. But everyone said how much worse this one was and that wasn’t – that wasn’t fair. Why should one man get to just take whatever he wanted from us? I – I couldn’t do anything about that on own but I thought, if I could find someone who _could_ – well, that was something I could try and do.”

“You wanted a hero?”

“I thought that’s what we needed. I thought – we all thought he had an army. If we’d just known that he’d killed most of them!”

“You’d have still been scared of his magic. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know. Everyone was angry as well as afraid. If they’d thought they had a chance . . .”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

“I wanted to give them a chance. I thought that M – that you would do that.”

“Did you really believe I would?”

“I . . . hoped.”

“Because of old stories?”

“I didn’t know what else to hope for.”

Foreman lowered his head, not quite in a nod. She thought he was going to say something but he did not and once more, they walked on in silence.

* * *

The escaped prisoners were hiding in a hollow just shy of the Brose farm, resting to recover their strength. Jesser was astonished to see Gissel alive. She could hardly believe it when they told her the baron was dead. Then Foreman did his head-feeling and ear-tweaking thing, bringing a couple of her friends out of a stupor, and she believed it a little more.

Together, they made an uneven procession towards the village. Foreman hung back, helping along the slowest, so it was left to Gissel to lead the way. She did not mind particularly, though it was hard not to feel their conversation was unfinished.

She did not know what to expect, coming back to her home in . . . triumph? It was, wasn't it? This was what she had wanted. Why she had snuck away and trekked to the Dark Tower in the first place, all while knowing that her parents would have forbidden such a thing in an instant had they suspected what she was going to do. Even her father thought her crazy to suggest seeking help in the forest. _Stories don't always hold the answers we need_ , he said.

Well, he had been wrong about that. But it turned out, she was in no hurry to tell him so.

“It's just past here,” she told Jesser, pointing to a copse ahead of them before dropping back to where Foreman was walking. He was fiddling with the wand, twisting and pressing to no effect.

“Nearly there?” he asked her without looking up.

“Yes.”

“I suppose there will be lots of people asking lots of questions.”

“Probably.”

“There always are.” The way he said it, he sounded very tired.

“We, uh, don't have to go there if you don't want to.”

“We don't?”

“We could just go back to the fields. It's easy to get there from here.”

Someone called out from up ahead, figures coming out from the trees. Even at a distance, Gissel recognised Seth Nandy and his grandson, foraging bags slung over their shoulders. The old man bent to speak into the boy's ear, sending him haring off in the other direction.

“Our arrival is announced.” Foreman watched Seth approach.“Is there a decent healer here, to look after this lot?”

“Oh yes. People come for Mother Bracknel's remedies from all over. And Thom Drake has been her apprentice for three years now. They'll be in good hands.”

“Meaning there is probably nothing to be gained by me sticking around?”

“Well . . .” Now Gissel thought about it, having a magician to do the explaining might be a better idea than just putting off the inevitable confrontation. “Everyone will want to say thank you. They'll probably throw you a party.”

Foreman winced. “Drinking? Dancing? Making merry? That sort of thing?”

“Uh . . . probably.”

He pushed the wand inside his tunic. “In that case, you'd better show me this shortcut before someone starts hanging bunting.”

Drat.

It was easy to slip away. Jesser was moving to meet Seth half-way and most of the others were too busy catching their breath to notice Gissel and Foreman darting off the road. Soon they were in among the trees, climbing the hill towards the high meadows.

“So . . . what are you going to do now?” Gissel asked when she thought they were a safe distance away.

“Tidy up a few things. See if I can't give you lot an easy time of it in the coming months, give you some space to work out how you want to run things without the nobility.”

“You can . . . do that?”

“Perhaps. We'll see.” Foreman clasped his hands behind his back. “At the very least I can double check for anyone or anything that might have followed the cabinet here. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“Not a clue. That's why I need to check.” He pursed his lips. “And speaking of things I need to do . . . I owe you an apology. For yesterday. For being so . . . rude and dismissive. And for turfing you out into a dangerous forest at night. I'm sorry.”

Gissel blinked. He sounded completely sincere. “You did just save us all,” she pointed out, “I think that means I have to forgive you.”

“No.” He stopped, putting a hand on her shoulder and turning her to face him, to look her in the eyes. “Absolutely not. Never believe anyone who tells you that doing you a good turn entitles them to treat you badly.”

“Ah . . . all right. I mean, obviously.” She did not know what else to say.

“Hm.” Foreman let go and stepped back. “Good.”

The apology was very disconcerting. Never mind him being a magician beyond the rules of mortal men, Gissel could not remember the last time an adult said sorry for shouting at her. Her mother never would and her father seldom raised his voice anyway. Now here was a stranger treating her with more respect than either of them. What was she supposed to do with that?

“Um,” she said as they came out into the field, “in the stories, M – uh, some magicians took people from their homes and let them travel across the stars. Is that true?”

“That some interfering old busy-body occasionally whisked people out into time and space for the company? Yes.”

“So . . . could you take me with you? While you’re . . . tidying up. Just for a bit. I mean, if you want to make up for being so –”

“I am not taking you time travelling so you can get out of a difficult conversation with your parents.”

“Oh.”

“Some things have to be faced. And besides. You’ll do more good here.”

She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He spun on the spot, arms spread wide, “I might be able to help give you the space to rearrange yourselves but I’m not going to do it for you. Do you think getting rid of the baron will just solve all your problems? Do you think the Widow Brose, with her fancy house and servants, won’t argue that she’s owed more of the stolen riches than the rest of you?”

Gissel had to agree that that would be just like Madam Brose. “What can I do about that?”

“Find people who also think it would be wrong. Start having loud conversations about how things could be better than they have been. Remember that you went gunning for the baron because what he was doing was unfair. People always want life to be fairer, even when they don’t agree on what that looks like. See if you can’t direct that towards something good.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It won’t be. It never is. Heroes from stories, they have it easy. They don’t have to stick around to build the happy ever after for everyone else.”

“Just like you’re not going to.”

They were nearly at the oak tree now. It stood where they had left it, still looking as if it had been there for years. Its leaves rustled as the branches swayed gently in the wind.

“Exactly,” said Foreman, “I’m going to swan off an leave you to it. Well, apart from everything I’m going to do first. But after that.”

“You’re not going to go back to the forest?”

“Perhaps I will. Perhaps I won’t. Maybe I’ll be there tomorrow. Or a century back. Who knows.”

He clicked his fingers and the door in the tree opened. The too-big room lay beyond, still there, still real. Any moment he was going to step back inside and then he would be gone. Leaving Gissel behind to make the explanations and change the world. Now _that_ was not fair.

“No,” he said, though she had not spoken a word, “it isn’t.”

They stood there for a moment, avoiding each other’s gaze. Gissel folded her arms. “You’d better get going then.”

Foreman drifted to the doorway. “I better had.”

“Thank you. Again. For helping.”

He nodded once and then he was gone, disappearing inside the impossibly transformed tower. The door clicked shut behind him, part of an unbroken tree-trunk once more.

Gissel reached out, wanting to touch, to see if it felt like it looked, all knobbly and gnarled with age. A vibration in the air stopped her. A sound rose around her, not as harsh as the wand's howl or as wild as the cabinet's roar but somewhere between them: a heaving, whispering, groaning noise that filled her head and made the world spin. The tree began to fade, colours and solidity washing away. In seconds she could see right through it. A few more and it was not there at all. The echo of its magic rang in her ears for a little while but that too quickly vanished.

There was not even a single bent blade of grass where the tree had been standing. When she stepped on to the ground in which it had seemed so deeply rooted, the earth was unbroken and no different from the rest of the meadow.

So that was that then. She was alone. And everything that happened next was going to be by the rules of normal people, not those of magician and sorcerers.

Taking a deep breath, Gissel started walking back down the hill.

* * *

Things did not turn out as badly as she expected. There was a lot of shouting but less than she had imagined. That might have had something to do with how Jesser and the others were there to back up her story and explain how she had helped them. It rather took the heart out of her parents' anger when there was people standing there saying they owed her their lives. Even more unexpectedly, it was her mother who calmed down first and started looking at her with pride in her eyes. Her father swept her into a bear hug the moment he saw her, then proceeded to act completely furious until riders went and came back to say that the castle keep was indeed in ruins and the baron's men were almost all fled. He then collapsed to relieved weeping that frightened Gissel far more than his angry words.

Afterwards, it came home to her just how much she had scared her parents by disappearing into the forest. She tried very hard to feel bad about that. Or rather, she did feel bad about it but it was hard to actually regret anything she had done, save perhaps not nailing Foreman to the floor so that he could explain the mechanics of what had happened.

Credit to him where it was due, though: he had been absolutely right about what she needed to do next. Madam Brose and the other richer farmers did indeed try to argue that they were owed more recompense than those who were actually starving. And there were many who grumbled at this, who agreed that it was not right to replace one unfairness with another simply because it did not come with magic and soldiers. Gissel joined her voice to theirs, using the mystique that grew around her as 'the magician's summoner' as a lever to get into conversations with people who wanted things to be better. Jesser hardly needed convincing on that. Surprisingly, neither did Wulelf.

Gissel's mother gave him a job at the forge. He turned out to be a far better blacksmith than knight.

There were many in the villages who feared what change might bring. Not just those who were quite happy with where they had stood before the baron started upsetting things, but those who said that having no lord and no knights would be an invitation to marauders and monsters. They quivered in the knowledge that the castle was unmanned and broken, expecting that any moment a horde of terrors would pour from the forest to kill them all.

No such thing came. And those protests carried less weight with every month that the valley stayed quiet. Gissel was sure they had Foreman to thank for that, though she was careful not to say so out loud. She agreed instead with those who argued that a careful watch, solid hiding places and learning how to use the land in defence of those living on it was better than a hundred knights. For one thing, it would not need metal and food spent on people who did nothing most of the time. For another, there was now plenty of evidence that a knight was little match for magic or cunning.

One thing that did come from beyond the Valley was the concern of those who had traded in machinery with the baron. Where was what they had been promised, asked their messengers. Gone to feed those who had more claim on it, went the reply. This too caused anxiety in those prone to worrying about outsiders. Would it not bring revenge to break a contract so? Again, nothing happened. Or rather, no violence came of it. Instead, the messengers returned and asked if they might trade straight with those who grew the food and minded the flocks? After all, scavenged machines still could not be eaten.

And so things went. Small improvements becoming larger. Common cause found amidst the rebuilding of lives. A growing understanding that this miraculous chance should not be wasted.

Half a year after the baron fell, the villages of the Valley came together, not just the head-people and the farmers who could afford to be grand, but herders and farm-hands and blacksmiths and storytellers and healers and foragers and . . . everyone. A great gathering to speak and be heard, to share ideas for how to do things better. Everyone talking to everyone else, understanding how things were and where that was not enough.

There were not many decisions made that day, yet there was not one person who came away without realising how many choices lay before them. The seeds were planted and in the seasons that followed, they grew and grew.

Gissel thought of Foreman sometimes, wondering what he would make of the changes and if he would ever come back to see them. Perhaps he already had, changing his tower into a tree or a barn or a hill so that he could watch from afar. She imagined how he might have been protecting them, tending this new way of things like a gardener guiding a particularly fragile flower. More often, she thought of herself in that role, nudging and prodding and backing up everyone who dreamt of a world made fair for everyone.

She made quite a name for herself. If her father was a storyteller of the past, them she became something of the same for the future. She did not have his skill, his way of speaking so that it stuck in the mind long after the story was told. Yet she had a knack for asking the right questions, for speaking loudly when others needed to hear and silencing those who needed to listen. She discovered in herself a courage that was less fearlessness and more the understanding that frightening things needed to be faced.

More of Foreman's words coming true. But only because she had decided to make them so.

* * *

Gissel's twentieth winter was one of the coldest that the Valley had seen in living memory. Yet thanks to everything that had changed since she first set out for the Dark Tower, it was far from the hardest. People were fed. Stores were safe. The sick were tended. Newborns cried healthily in their mothers' arms. The snow and ice was met with good humour and the certain knowledge that everyone was pitching in to work through them.

As she walked up through the fields that had once belonged to Farmer Brose, Gissel tried not to feel too guilty for taking a moment to herself. After all, she had spent most of the morning negotiating with the machine-traders who were wintering in the Valley, seeing if they would part with a few more heaters before they journeyed to the Southern Edge in search of richer customers. She was all in favour of insisting on it, given that their ornithopters were taking up valuable shelter within the old castle walls. Except she could see the sense in not trying to force the issue, lest they take their business elsewhere next winter. And there was part of her that wanted to keep them sweet purely on the chance she might be able to journey with them for a season, maybe travel to the Machine Wastes or even the Golden Mountains.

It was a silly impulse, born of the glittering troves the traders brought with them and their stories of what lay beyond the Valley and the Forests. But it was something she felt and she was long past trying to bury her feelings on anything.

The ground was hard beneath the crunching snow, earth turned to stone by the frost. Her breath billowed about her head and she could feel the cold creeping in despite her warmest clothes. Still, it was worth it for the view. She kept coming back up here, making the excuse to walk this way and look out over the lands she knew, imagining what more she could do for the people who lived there. It was all so beautiful and alive in summer, and in winter . . . a starker beauty, whites and greys made vibrant by the cool sun.

And if she sometimes wished that she might hear the whispering roar of the Dark Tower, well, that was the fancy of someone who had once seen magic.

She imagined it now in the shifting wind, dancing at the edge of being real. Only –

Gissel stopped, just past the hilltop, frowned and looked over her shoulder. Surely it _was_ just the wind? Surely that could not be the shadow of a tree forming behind her, branches reaching into the cloudless sky, growing ever more solid?

But –

It was. That was the sound of something far beyond understanding easing aside the curtain of the air and that was a gnarled old oak pushing its way into the world. Its leaves had fallen with the season but otherwise, it was exactly as she remembered it, rooted solidly in the earth even as it was impossible that it could have forced its way into the ground. The sound of its arrival died away and she gaped, not believing her eyes, not believing she was not dreaming, though the bite of the cold told her she must be awake.

She knew she had not wished for this. Foreman had done his part for the Valley. If she had pictured herself meeting him again, it would have been in the forest, when she found the time and the will to make that journey again and see if the junk yard still encircled the never-falling tower. She had never imagined that he might –

In one stride, she stood before the tree and tentatively pressed a gloved hand to the bark. As much as she could feel through thick wool, it seemed as rough and age-cracked as any other oak she might touch. Only, the gentle pressure of her fingers was enough to set a whole section of it swinging inwards, a door just big enough for a grown man. Inside was a room that went on and on, black stone and glinting metal, a great ring of lights, a strange altar and a crystal column.

At the end of the bridge, looking no different for the years that had past, Foreman stood leaning against the altar with his arms folded. His chalk-white face twitched into a smile and then into something far more sombre. He took a deep breath.

“Hello Gissel Smith,” he said, “I need your help.”


End file.
